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The Past
Has Another
Pattern

MEMOIRS

George W Ball

• W • NORTON & COMPANY • NEW YORK • LONDON

Unless otherwise credited, photographs are from authors personal hie.

Copyright © 1982 by George W. Ball. All rights reserved. Published simultaneously in
Canada by George J. McLeod Limited, Toronto. Printed in the United States of America.

FIRST EDITION

The text of this book is composed in photocomposition Basket ville. 1 he typeface used for
display is Typositor Deepdene. Composition and manufacturing are by the Maple-Vatl
Book Manufacturing Group.

BOOK DESIGN BY MARJORIE J. FLOCK

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Ball, George W.

The past has another pattern.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Ball, George W. 2. United States — Foreign
relations— 1945- 3 - United States— Foreign

relations— 1933-1945. 4 - Statesmen— United States—

Biography. I. Title.

E840.8.B32A36 1982 9739 81-18924

AACR2

ISBN O-393-OI481-9

W. W. Norton 8 c Company, Inc. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.\ . 101 10
W. W. Norton 8 c Company Ltd. 37 Great Russell Street, London WCiB 3NL 7

1234567890

Books by George W. Ball

Diplomacy for a Crowded World
The Discipline of Power
The Past Has Another Pattern

George W. Ball. Portrait by Everett Raymond Kinstler, 1973

To my brother,
Stuart S. Ball,
who knows much of this story
better than I

Contents

Preface ^

Acknowledgments xi

parti Years before Pearl Harbor

1 . The First Eighteen Years Are the Easiest /

2. From Depression to War, Ploughs, and “Habbakuks” iy

part ii The War Years

3. Lend-Lease and the Avoidance of War Debts 29

4. The Bombing Survey ^2

5. Albert Speer on a Grade-B Movie Set 33

part 111 Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

6. Jean Monnet

7. The Parturition of Europe 84

8. A Washington Lawyer pp

part iv Adlai Stevenson and Politics

9. Stevenson 7//

10. The 1956 Campaign and After I ^ I

1 1. The French Crisis and Stevenson Again ( 1958-1961 ) 152

part v The Kennedy Years

12. Early Kennedy Years 163

13. The Context of the Time and the Kennedy Program 1^4

14. Assisting and Resisting the Third World 182

15. The Tradesman s Entrance to Foreign Policy 195

viii Contents

16. The Mystique of a Grand Design 208

17. Troubles in the Congo 222

18. The General and His Thunderbolts 259

19. Ayub Khan and Salazar 274

20. The Cuban Missile Crisis 286

2 1 . Day of the Murder 310

part vi The Johnson Years

2 2 . Sailing under a New Skipper 317

23. Cyprus 337

part vii The Vietnam Aberration

24. Vietnam — The Initial Error 3 6°

25. The Balloon Rises Quickly 3^5

26. The Dusty End of a Reign of Error 403

part viii The Private Sector

27. The Decision to Resign 424

28. The Private Sector — With East River Interlude 434

29. From Nixon to Ford to Carter 448

30. Over and Out 4^7

Notes 493

Index 509

ILLUSTRATIONS follow page 234
maps on pages 223 and 339

Preface

More than a half-century has passed since I first read T. E.
Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom , yet I can still recall his vignettes of
the personalities he encountered. I remember particularly his assess-
ment of Sir Ronald Storrs, then the Oriental Secretary of the Residency
in Cairo, whom Lawrence described as “the most brilliant Englishman
in the Near East.” Storrs, he said, was “subtly efficient,” but he could
have been far more so “had he not spread his energies over a wide spec-
trum of . . . interests — or, in other words, “had he been able to deny
himself the world. . . .”

I mentioned this comment one afternoon when Jean Monnet and 1
were working together in his country house at Houjarray, a few kilo-
meters from Paris. “Of course, Lawrence was right,” he observed, “and
you should take it to heart. You ought to deny yourself the world far
more than you do. You shouldn’t diffuse your energies, let so many
things light up your imagination. You should find yourself a single theme,
a single cause, and devote your life to it. 1 hat’s the only way you’ll ever
move mountains.”

Though Monnet’s advice was no doubt right, he knew that 1 would
not follow it. As this book discloses, I could never muster the discipline
to concentrate exclusively on a single well-defined objective or — to put it
another way — to hold any job very long. Monnet was not the only one to
chide me about this. When, in 1968, under relentless pressure from
President Lyndon Johnson, I undertook a brief stint as United States
ambassador to the United Nations, my old friend John Kenneth Gal-
biaith wi ote anxiously to record his bafflement at my “curious career
pattern.”

A book of memoirs is by definition an exercise in self-indulgence, yet
to undertake such a task implies some acknowledgment of fading ambi-
tion. 1 recall a story about Bertrand Russell, who, when urged in his
eighties to write his memoirs, replied, “Who can say that it’s not prema-
ture? Some day I may be the President of Mexico.”

x Preface

Well, I have looked out across the Rio Grande without seeing a single
favorable whiff of smoke, so I am now reconciled. I know I shall never
be President of Mexico.

Hence, this book.

Acknowledgments

It was James A. (Scotty) Reston who hrst proposed this hook.
I could, he suggested, expose my prejudices more effectively through
memoirs than through the casual short pieces I was then writing for
newspapers and magazines. But that was the extent of his culpability; he
is in no way responsible for the content of these pages, and I hope his
role as instigator will not trouble his Calvinist conscience.

I have benefitted from the help and advice of many. John Kenneth
Galbraith read the manuscript with his legendary fortitude and pro-
vided much wise and friendly counsel. Barbara Wendell Kerr cleared
away vast amounts of the underbrush strangling my prose, to the extent
that I can now understand most of what I have written. George Spring-
steen, an old comrade in arms on the State Department barricades, sup-
plemented my faulty memory and provided much sound advice. Elinor
Green spent hours reviewing manuscripts and expanding and checking
bits and pieces of the story.

Yoma Ullman devoted many months assembling, organizing, and
interpreting huge dunes of documents I had untidily accumulated over
many years; it was a lonely, tedious task performed with patience, high
skill, dedication — and good humor. Dr. Larissa Onyshkevych completed
that research, held me firmly to the record, and provided much of the
documentation found in the footnotes.

I owe a special vote of thanks to Helen T. Vahey, my resourceful
assistant for thirteen years. She approached this book with the same
impressive energy, dedication, and acute judgment she had displayed
during all my other enterprises; the book could not have been com-
pleted, even on a long-deferred deadline, without her deep commit-
ment. Mary E. Koester also provided invaluable assistance, patiently
transforming my love affair with a tape recorder into pages of elegant
typescript and faithfully pointing out when I was talking nonsense. Lee
Good Hurford combined patience and tolerance with the magic of word
processing to produce the finished product, while Carol Plum proved
valiant in time of need.

xii Acknowledgments

I express my profound gratitude to Evan W. Thomas, my stern but
understanding editor at Norton, whose expert guidance was indispen-
sable. I accepted his advice almost invariably, not from cowardice but
because he was right. In addition, I greatly benefitted from the counsel
and encouragment of Donald S. Lamm, president of Norton, whose
comments were incisive and always helpful.

My thanks, as always, to Ruth M. Ball, who has for a half-century
been my most patient but forgiving critic. My historian son, Dr. Douglas
B. Ball, proved a sound adviser on times past. My son John C. Ball was
a constant source of encouragement. My brother, Stuart S. Ball, also
read the book and remembered much I had forgotten or never known.
And finally, Alfred and Margarita Ramirez provided the environment
conducive to intensive writing.

It seems, as one becomes older,

I hat the past has another pattern, and ceases to he a mere sequence —
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy,

Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,

Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness — not the sense of well-being,

Fruition, fulfillment, security or affection,

Or even a very good dinner, hut the sudden illumination—

We had the experience hut missed the meaning, . . .

— T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages

PART I

Years before Pearl

Harbor

I. The First Eighteen Years Are
the Easiest

“Autobiography,” wrote Lord Vansittart, “would be easier had
we all eccentric parents.” Though my own parents lacked that distinc-
tion, my paternal grandfather was eccentric enough to make up for the
deficiency.

Born in Cornwall in 1849 (which enabled him, when he lived in Cal-
ifornia many years later, to refer to himself as a “forty-niner”), Amos
Ball, Sr., grew up on the island of Jersey, where his father, Isaac Ball,
was a gardener on the estate of Charles Tennyson — brother of the poet.
Apprenticed to a baker, he was reputed by family legend to have deliv-
ered bread to Victor Hugo, then living in exile; indeed, improved by
time and retelling, the story even had Hugo hiring him to read the French
classics aloud. Since, as I have now discovered, my grandfather was only
five years old when Hugo lived in Jersey, I would attribute these claims
moi e to the exuberance of family chroniclers than to his dubious pre-
cocity.

On June 24, 1874, my grandfather married Selina Scoble, a lady’s
maid to a family recently arrived from Devon. It was a marriage of
opposites. My grandfather was a small, dark-complexioned Cornish-
man, with a black beard, mischievous eyes, and a volatile temper; she
was a tall, large-boned, handsome girl, compassionate and unselfish. Her
indefatigable common sense compensated for my grandfather’s irre-
sponsibility.

They were married by the dean of Jersey, the father of Lily Lang-
try the ‘Jersey Lily” who later became famous not only as a beauty and
an actress but also as the mistress of Edward VII. Though I doubt my

2

Years before Pearl Harbor

grandfather ever actually met Lily, he talked about her as though she
were an old friend, just as he spoke of his acquaintance with the Pre-
Raphaelite painter Sir John Millais, who had helped him when he fell
from his baker’s wagon. In sum, my grandfather was a name-
dropper — a trait he passed on to many of his descendants. I suspect also
that his desire to associate himself with the famous reflected caste-
consciousness. Intellectually contemptuous of almost everyone, he could
not conceal his deference toward the “upper classes” — a fine, old-
fashioned phrase he used reverentially.

Soon after their marriage, my grandparents moved to Devon to be
near my grandmother’s family. Settled for a while at Kingswear on the
River Dart, they then moved some miles northeast to Highweek, just up
the hill from Newton Abbot, where my father, Amos Ball, Jr., was born
May 3, 1877.

Five years later, when my grandfather’s bakery went bankrupt, he
decided— no doubt at his wife’s urging— to leave England. He had at the
time three children: my father and two daughters, one older and one
younger than my father. Another child was on the way. (Years later, my
uncle John Ball, the youngest of what had by then become a family of
nine children, was accustomed to excuse his own delinquencies by
explaining, “What could you expect of anyone born behind the eight
Ball?”)

My grandfather was encouraged to go to America by his wife’s sister,
Sarah Parkhouse (known as “Sally”), whose husband, caught poaching
and forced to flee England, had invested his earnings from illegal veni-
son in farm land near the village of Toledo, Iowa. From there, my great-
aunt Sally supplied her kinfolk in the Old Country with a weekly chron-
icle of her life in the idyllic Iowa countryside, which combined, she
implied, the best features of the Garden of Eden with “England’s green
and pleasant land.”

Impressed, though skeptical, my grandfather set out to see for him-
self, arranging with my grandmother that, after their fourth child was
born, she should sell their household possessions and join him. Just why
he left when his wife was in advanced pregnancy and why he went first
to Canada when his ultimate destination was Toledo, Iowa, remains
wrapped in mystery — though he did have a penchant for bad planning.
In any event, soon after he had left, the baby was born, and some weeks
later, my grandfather wrote to ask my grandmother if she felt able to
bring the young family to America by herself. If so, she should come; if
not, he would return to England and escort them.

Hardheaded as usual, my grandmother knew that, in the month
required for a reply to reach her husband, she could already be across
the water. So, with her four young children, she set sail for Canada only
to find that her husband had impetuously sailed on a ship that had passed

The First Eighteen Years Are the Easiest 5

hers in the mid -Atlantic. Thus my father’s hrst home in the New World
was an immigrant shed in Quebec, where my grandmother and her brood
slept until my grandfather could work his way back to Canada as a sto-
ker. It was, my father told me, a shock for a small boy to see his mother
embrace a filthy, besooted man who suddenly appeared at their door.

Life with my grandfather was a badly written serial, replete with
pratfalls and belly laughs. When the family finally reached Toledo, my
grandfather found nothing that resembled Aunt Sally’s descriptions. It
took him several days to discover that they were in Toledo, Ohio, and
not Toledo, Iowa, some five hundred miles away.

Nor did they find a land of milk and honey at their destination. Aunt
Sally’s husband had become a shiftless drunk, mistreating his wife and
neglecting the farm, and her dithyrambic bulletins had been merely an
escape from sordid reality — early examples of the modern real estate
brochure.

Life in an Iowa village in the 1880s was awkward and precarious for
an immigrant family — the poorest in town — looked down on by the
natives in spite of my grandfather’s belief in the God-ordained superi-
ority of Englishmen. Though his efforts to preach as a lay Wesleyan
minister no doubt nourished his soul, they provided no food for the
family, which, during their chilly first winter, lived largely on the gift of
frozen potatoes. A pumpkin donated by a kindly neighbor proved a
disaster; unfamiliar with that exotic vegetable, my grandmother made
everyone ill by cooking it whole, including the seeds.

In time, my grandfather established a hay and feed store, which he
later expanded to include groceries and general merchandise, and it was
in the rooms behind the store that my father grew up. With some help
from his younger brother George (for whom I was named), my father
kept the faltering business going, while the senior Amos Ball conducted
a nonstop seminar in theology for cronies sprawled in perpetual session
around the wood stove and spittoon. With his black beard fiercely wag-
ging, he was a certified eccentric in a small midwestern village where, a
hundred years ago, eccentrics were a dime a dozen. Wearing an old felt
hat, indoors and out, he would elaborately greet any actual or potential
customers who might enter the store. When, many years later, his sons
installed a telephone, he would cautiously pick up the receiver as though
it were about to explode, then lift his hat if a woman’s voice answered.

Much to my father’s disgust, my grandfather’s business practices
were idiosyncratic. Since he felt it beneath his dignity to ask the
name of a customer, substantial credits might be entered on his books to
“the gray beard from north of Tama’’ or to “the little saddler.” But behind
his eccentricity lay a shrewd sense of self-survival and a canny stratagem
for avoiding work. Though his own father and grandfather had both
lived to ninety, he announced in his early fifties that he had only a few

4 Years before Pearl Harbor

more years of life left to him. Even while his beard was still jet black, he
would intone lugubriously, “My days are in the sere, the yellow leaf” — a
sentiment he repeated incessantly for more than three decades until he
finally died at eighty-five. I remember him well in his last years when he
came from his home in California to visit us in Des Moines on the excuse
of a church convocation. He was still spry and smugly pleased with his
own virtuosity. A gifted actor, he could go in and out of character in an
instant. After poking cruel fun at the professional ecclesiastics (he never
gave up his amateur status), he would, as though on cue, assume that
posture of “querulous serenity” perfected by Jane Austen’s Mrs. Ben-
net. For the benefit of his elderly sister, who looked after him, he could
give a bravura impersonation of a saint so convincing as to leave her with
permanent suspension of disbelief. But piety, as my father pointed out,
demanded something more than homiletics and a cunning smile, espe-
cially when the old man was sadistically exploiting his sister’s sentimen-
tality for his own comfort. It was the hrst time I had ever witnessed
cynicism in action, and as a child I felt confused and uneasy. Later, when
I read that at his wife’s funeral, Theobald, in The Way of All Flesh, “buried
his face in his handkerchief to conceal his want of grief,” I was reminded
of my grandfather.

My Father

With erratic paternal assistance — or, more frequently, obstruction —
my father worked fourteen-hour days to keep the small, shaky general
store from going under. Though he had to leave school at the age of
nine and received a total of only about four years of formal schooling
during his entire life, he still became, by any standard, a well-, though
unevenly, educated man. He read every book he could borrow. He
developed an ear for the beauty of words and the cadence of speech by
immersing himself not only in the King James version of the Bible but
also in the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, Macaulay, De Quincey, Mil-
ton, and Gibbon. For self-discipline and from a love of language, he
learned by heart the first five books of Paradise Lost — large passages of
which he could still recite sixty years later. With his sister’s help, he taught
himself Pitman shorthand and became such an expert typist that the
Remington Typewriter Company once tried to hire him as a speed dem-
onstrator.

When he was nineteen, a traveling salesman off ered my f ather a job
with the Standard Oil Company in Marshalltown, Iowa, a larger town
eighteen miles away from Toledo. Feeling his heavy responsibility for a
fey family, he hesitated to leave until his mother pushed him out of the
nest. Scraping together a few dollars she had squirreled away unbe-
knownst to her husband, she handed my father the railroad fare to Mar-

The First Eighteen Years Are the Easiest 5

shalltown and a few days’ living expenses. There was, she insisted, no
future for him in Toledo, and, much as she wanted him near her, he
was destined to do great things.

In Marshalltown, he was first put to work driving a tankwagon, then
promoted to a clerk’s job where, in addition to sweeping the floor, he
could use his stenographic proficiency. Practicing a disciplined frugality,
he would walk two miles every night rather than spend five cents for a
street car. He always carried a nickel with him but, as he told me later,
he took satisfaction in finding it still in his pocket at the end of the day.
Those evening excursions were principally to call on a vivacious young
country schoolteacher named Edna Wildman, whom he had met some
years after arriving in Marshalltown. Only four feet eleven — a tiny part-
ner for a six-foot Englishman — she was not deterred by her diminutive
dimensions from spunkily disciplining her farm-boy students, many of
whom were as old as she and twice her size.

In time, my father’s hard work and intelligence won him a promo-
tion to the divisional office of his company in Des Moines, some seventy
miles away; a year later he and Edna Wildman were married. Since the
Wildman family was a closed ecosystem, it was a giant step for my mother
to leave her parents and move so far away, and, though she finally came
to call Des Moines her home, she never felt completely happy away from
Marshalltown and the company of her brothers and sisters.

What made her exile bearable was the arrival of a family. My brother
Stuart was born in 1905 and my brother Ralph in 1907. I appeared on
the scene four days before Christmas in 1909 — a far from quiet time. All
over the world people and nations were being beastly to one another in
imaginative ways. Within a few months before or after my birth, the
Shah of Persia was deposed; the Prime Minister of Egypt was assassi-
nated; Italy started a war to acquire Tripoli and Cyrenaica; the British
gained control of the four northern states of the Malay Peninsula; Ger-
many and France engaged in a quarrel over dominance in Morocco
which was settled by the International Court at The Hague; the Union
of South Africa came into existence; the Manchu Dynasty fell; Japan
annexed Korea; King Leopold II died in Belgium; Bethmann-Hollweg
replaced Prince Bernhard von Billow as Chancellor of Germany; a radi-
cal government under Clemenceau and Briand destroyed the Left Coa-
lition in France; and Britain faced a major constitutional crisis over the
1909 budget.

In spite of these events — which perhaps reflect no more than the
world’s usual portion of turmoil — most wise men of the West still accepted
the nineteenth century’s favorable prognosis for the human species. They
believed in the idea of progress, reinforced by the Darwinian hypothesis
and an abiding faith in the perfectibility of man. Few would have pre-
dicted that Europe was moving pell-mell toward the first of those two

6 Years before Pearl Harbor

cataclysmic civil wars — as Dean Acheson later called them — that, within
my lifetime, were to change the face of the world.

Early Years

My childhood was a happy time — with few disturbing incidents, except
that, for whatever the psychoanalysts may make of it, I was chased by an
angry mother swan when I was three years old.* Because two of my
mother’s uncles had been drowned, I was not allowed to swim — and I
have never learned more than a rudimentary stroke. Nor had I any taste
for the manly art of murdering animals, though, given an air rifle by an
indulgent uncle, I once shot absentmindedly at a robin, confident I could
never hit it. When the unaccommodating bird fell dead, I hid my remorse
in the darkness of my room. Later an enterprising teacher named Miss
Dobson briefly interested me in birdwatching, but — though I am still
fond of birds — I can hardly tell a chicken hawk from a chicken.

During my first eleven years, I attended public schools in Des Moines,
but, on balance, I probably learned more from arguing with my father
and my brother Stuart, both of whom read avidly and were endowed
with almost total recall. Since we all held strong views — or, more prop-
erly, strong prejudices — the family dinner table was the scene of a con-
tinuing dispute about history, literature, and politics; in fact, few meals
were ever finished without one of us leaving the table to try to prove a
point from Chambers’s Encyclopedic Dictionary.

My brother Stuart had a weapon that gave him what I regarded as
an unfair advantage. Fascinated from an early age by genealogy, he
printed in a minute script huge genealogical tables. Inscribed on the
reverse side of leftover rolls of wallpaper, his tables ran the full length
of each roll, and if one roll were not enough, he pasted two together.
Often he would settle an argument by flinging one of his huge rolls
dramatically on the floor, giving it a kick, and letting it publish its learn-
ing the length of two rooms. His particular delight was to document the
illegitimacy that blemished the family trees of noble families, and many
years later the idea still seemed to please him. When, as a State Depart-
ment official, I would introduce him to political figures from Great Brit-
ain or the Continent who had titles printed in Burke’s or the Almanack
de Gotha , he would delight in telling me of the bars sinister in their fam-
ilies, going back eight or nine hundred years to prove his point.

Those forays around the dining table were field days for everyone

* For reasons I do not understand, I apparently have an irritating effect on swans, since
I was pecked at by another such monster in 1961 at a geisha picnic near Kyoto. I got my
own back that time by stepping on its bill, but I am sure my more imaginative critics can —
and will — draw dark inferences from my odd involvement with a creature so scandalously
thought of by both Freud and the ancient Greeks.

The First Eighteen Years Are the Easiest 7

but my mother and my brother Ralph, who was the quiet one. My mother
came from a gentle, unadventurous family in which conversation was
limited to the minutiae of the day. The merest breath of controversy was
an ill wind that blew no one any good; argument for the Wildmans was
the immoral equivalent of war and they were dialectical pacifists. In
sharp contrast to the senior Amos Ball, my maternal grandfather, John
Wildman, was a quiet, courteous gentleman whose amiability belied his
record as a soldier. Though he abhorred crossing swords at the dinner
table, he looked back on his four years in the Union Army (taken pris-
oner and later exchanged) as the epic experience that drained the rest
of his life of drama and color. My early recollections of him consist
largely of his Civil War stories; for him, everything after Appomattox
was anti-climax. He had married my grandmother — after her first hus-
band failed, either through choice or mortality, to return from the
war — and, thereafter, had held a succession of small state or county jobs
(deputy sheriff, state oil inspector, and so on), committing only the
minimum effort to any assignment. His interests were concentrated in
the Grand Army of the Republic, the veteran’s organization influential at
that time, together with the Masonic Order, in which he played an en-
thusiastic, if unobtrusive, role.

Since the serene inconsequence of her family household left my
mother unprepared for coexistence with a whole zoo of assertive males,
she frequently sat defenseless, while unguided missiles whizzed merrily
by. It was only after my wife, Ruth, had joined the family that my mother
acquired an intrepid ally. Refusing to be cowed, Ruth rose and stood at
the table until silence abruptly descended. That happened only once or
twice; the lesson was learned, and women were granted the right to be
heard. It was the first insidious intrusion of women’s lib that the Ball
family experienced.

In the evening and on Sundays, my father regularly read aloud from
his favorite authors, taking obvious pleasure in the beauty of words and
phrases. When he was not reading to us, we were most often reading to
ourselves. Each Saturday we followed a ritual. After lunch the whole
family walked a half-mile down the hill to the public library, where we
spent the afternoon, each pursuing his or her own lines of interest; then,
in the evening, we formed a stylized procession back up the hill — the tall
man, his short wife, and three sons graduated in height like the down-
ward curve of a disastrous stock market. Each carried a suitcase appro-
priate to his or her size and station, containing the books borrowed for
consumption during the next seven days. It was a weekly adventure to
which we all looked forward.

With the advent of World War I, my brother Stuart taught Ralph
and me the military drills he was learning in school; we then re-fought
the current battles with armies of spools deployed about the attic floor,
trying to reconstruct from newspaper descriptions the maneuvering of

8 Years before Pearl Harbor

each side, as well as its strategy and tactics. My mother helped us procure
the spools from her neighbors, and we had a vast number. Even greater
reality was given to our wartime exertions when my father’s much
younger brother, John Ball, who lived with us from time to time, went
off to the army. Taking naturally to soldiering, he was soon commis-
sioned, and, since he was for a time stationed near Des Moines, his
appearance in uniform gave the family a certain distinction. Later, when
he sailed for France, we felt near the heart of the conflict.

On November 11, 1918, the guns fell silent and we all went down-
town to share in the excitement, thus inadvertently encouraging the
spread of the flu then raging. As our troops returned, I principally recall
the sight of soldiers embracing whatever girls happened to be wandering
by; there was a galvanizing gaiety in the air, and our local heroes all
seemed twelve feet tall. I shall never forget when General Pershing came
to our school and I actually shook his hand — though I concealed from
my parents the dismaying fact that he was wearing a glove. Those scenes
came back to my mind twenty-seven years later on V-E Day in Paris.

During my early years, life was not without perils, though I was pro-
tected from them as much as possible. In order to shelter his growing
family, my father made plans for a larger house to be built on a vacant
lot next to the cottage where I was born. To economize, he dug the
basement alone at night and on Sundays. During the summer, while our
new house was under construction, the family slept in a tent so we could
rent the cottage. Though disguised as an outing, that economy measure
proved disastrous; exhausted from overwork and exposure to inclement
weather, my father contracted lobar pneumonia. For a time it was touch
and go whether he would live.

Had he not survived, my life would have followed quite a different
course; as it was, he continued his diligent upward climb through the
hierarchical layers of the Standard Oil management until finally he
became a vice-president and director. As the youngest member of the
family, I benefited the most, not only from the rising level of family
income, but also from the increasingly liberal view my parents gained
from exposure to a wider world. My brother Stuart had the far more
difficult task of breaking new ground. Apart from my wife, Ruth, my
father takes prime place among those who did most to shape my own
attitudes. I absorbed his love of literature, his detachment, and his sense
of the ridiculous.

Although my father established a formidable business reputation, his
work gave him few intellectual satisfactions or rewarding companions.
Respected by colleagues and feared by competitors, he was still regarded
as formal and reserved, definitely not one of the boys. It was an attitude
he could never shake off, although I think at times he wanted to. He was
constrained by shyness, the defensive habits of self-containment acquired
in his youth, and the inner knowledge that he differed from his business

The First Eighteen Years Are the Easiest 9

associates in taste and intellectual interests. So, although — or, to some
extent, because — he had an incorrigible sense of the absurd, he was never
fully at ease with his fellow businessmen. Withdrawn to the point where
he sometimes seemed stiff, he was in awe of those who wore their Doc-
torates of Philosophy as badges of omniscience. Like several other men
I was to know later in life — including one President of the United States —
he could not forget the inadequacy of his formal education. Never hesi-
tant to assert his views — no Ball ever had an unexpressed thought — he
yet remained to his death excessively deferential toward academics.

In 1922, when I was twelve years old, my father was promoted to the
head office of the Standard Oil Company in Chicago, as assistant general
manager of marketing. At my mother’s urging, the family was estab-
lished in Evanston, Illinois, the home of Northwestern University, which,
she had decreed, her sons would attend. Determined to keep the family
intact as long as possible, she saw no reason why any of us should leave
home for college if home could be located near college.

The Dolors of Adolescence

Our departure from Des Moines marked the end of my childhood
and the beginning of a less tranquil adolescence. That I had a felicitous,
albeit confining, childhood seeems self-evident. The more I have seen
of the strains and problems in other families, the more I appreciate the
affection and solidarity that prevailed in ours. As a family, we were a
tight microcosm. My mother saw no reason why her sons should play
with any other children, and, indeed, we played together quite happily.
Yet all three sons paid some price for it, as we tried clumsily to adjust to
a larger social arena.

Evanston Township High School had quite a different quality from the
schools I had known in Des Moines and, for a boy of eleven, the transi-
tion presented more than the usual problems of adjustment. Although
the school now has the shape and appearance of a large, bureaucratized
institution, it was then still small, with a curriculum heavy in Latin and
Greek. Standards were high, and I had to work far harder than before;
but the academic fare was solid, and I found it exhilarating. The physical
embodiment of the school’s meaning, as it appeared to me, was an
impressive Mr. Chips named George Whipple. He had total confidence
in his own culture and standard of values. Latin, as he taught it, was far
more vivid than any modern tongue, while the ringing plains of Troy
became as familiar as our school playing fields. I suppose that in many
ways he was the first truly civilized man I had known, and I never forgot
him. He was distinctly of the old school — a gallant specimen of a rapidly
vanishing species. Like the passenger pigeon, his kind will not be seen
again, and so much the worse for all of us.

While I could adapt to Professor Whipple with easy gratification

io Years before Pearl Harbor

because I was not expected to deal with him on a level of equality, rela-
tions with my classmates were difficult. Evanston was still a small town
dominated by a group of rich families, far more worldly and experi-
enced than those I had known in my innocent years in Des Moines
(“sophisticated” was the word I used to myself without being very sure
what it meant). In the summer, the established families went off to Europe
or to smart resorts or to vacation houses in the country. During the school
years, there were parties and dances accessible only to those in the local
social register. But what increasingly set the elite apart was their constant
chatter of the future. Those whom I most envied and admired talked in
vibrant anticipation of Eastern colleges, where their names had been
inscribed from childhood. I made few friends. By nature gregarious, I
was forced in on myself more than I would have wished. But within a
few days of entering Northwestern University, I met the first (after my
father) of a small number of individuals who critically affected the course
of my thought and, indeed, the pattern of my life.

The De Voto Influence

Bernard De Voto (“Benny” as we all called him) was not in any sense
an overpowering personality, but, pursued by devils of self-doubt and
insecurity, he instinctively understood my adolescent awkwardness and
could teach me the defenses by which he sustained his own vulnerable
ego. Since my brother Stuart, who preceded me at Northwestern, had
already worked with Benny, I was overjoyed when — within a fortnight
after the opening of school — I was assigned to an experimental English
class over which De Voto presided. We were a specially anointed group
of eighteen or twenty students and we revelled in that knowledge, exhib-
iting a cockiness that De Voto first sought to demolish and then to direct
toward appropriate targets. Though he was then only twenty-nine years
old and had been a mere four years at Northwestern, Benny was already
widely known not merely as an outrageously irreverent young instructor
but also — it was grudgingly admitted — as a writer of promise.

More than a writer, he was also a gifted teacher — at least for those
who were charmed by his provocative manner and were eager to read
and talk. The studied unorthodoxy of his teaching methods first shocked
us to attention; then, as the rich resources of his reading and perception
became evident, we developed mounting respect. De Voto’s classroom
manner — when he held formal classes at all — was light-hearted and
taunting. Perched on the edge of his desk, he began by insulting his
students. Most of us would not, he said, be interested in what he would
teach and were incapable of learning it; if anyone wanted to avoid his
sessions, so much the better. Then he would walk up and down the room,
conducting colloquies with individual students, teasing the girls partic-

II

The First Eighteen Years Are the Easiest

ularly the prettiest ones — berating the Rotarian spirit that then afflicted
the university, and denouncing contemporary tastes and mores.

Yet Benny took a warm interest in the private problems of students
who responded to him. The fact that he once or twice adjourned class
so that he and I could play tennis, or that I could talk with him at almost
any time during the day, gave me the sense that I was, after all, thought
worthy of interest by the most interesting man in the university. Too
young and preoccupied with my own small problems, I did not suspect
that my new mentor had even more agonizing doubts and fears of his
own. What I acquired from Benny is hard to assess even after all this
time. It was, I suppose, what General de Gaulle referred to as an idee
certaine of myself and my relation to the rest of the world. As to the
immediate scene, he confirmed my belief that Northwestern, at that
moment in its history, was something less than my romanticised view of
what a great university should be— a comforting excuse for my invol-
untary aloofness.

Benny turned my personal awkwardness and lack of public accep-
tance into virtues, transforming me in the process into an obnoxious little
intellectual snob. Then, at the end of my first year, he departed, refusing
the assistant professorship he had been offered and opting for a life in
New England untrammeled by institutional obligations. Yet he did not
abandon me entirely but arranged before leaving to pass me on to his
closest friend on the faculty, Garrett Mattingly, a man of intellect and
sensitivity who later made a distinguished reputation as a historian with
his books Renaissance Diplomacy , Catherine of Aragon, and The Armada.
Mattingly was at all times sympathetic and generous with his time.

During my last two academic years, I took an honors course in liter-
ature. It ranged ambitiously from the classics through the Middle Ages
and into modern times. My tutor managed to convey particularly the
intellectual excitement of his own period of specialization, the eigh-
teenth century. I had by then read a bit of Francis Bacon, Hobbes, John
Locke, and the other English philosophers, but Voltaire captured my
imagination as no one else had done, and I felt myself a citizen of the
Age of Reason.

I he preeminent attraction of Voltaire was his wit, which sharply dis-
tinguished him from the cheerless Rousseau. Since I then believed — and
still do — that the only acceptable working hypothesis for a self-
respecting man is optimism, it seemed sensible to regard the human con-
dition as fundamentally comic. The long-faced literary types, I thought,
had got it backwards. Dramas and novels should not be lugubrious with
occasional comic relief, but funny with tragic interludes. That was before
the erudite hacks’ preoccupation with self had become such a literary
bore.

In the summer of 1929, after my junior year at Northwestern, my

12 Years before Pearl Harbor

brothers and I departed for Europe on a Middle-Western interpretation
of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour. I hat we should undertake this
pilgrimage had long been an ambition of my mother, who looked on
crossing the ocean — which presumably one did only once in a lifetime
as the capstone to an elegant education.

We sailed on a small Cunard liner with an ill-assorted collection of
students and vacationing school teachers, and for me, at nineteen, the
New Freedom suddenly became more than a slogan. We landed at Le
Havre, took the boat-train to Paris, and the next night set off to explore
the more innocent fleshpots. Paired off more or less by chance with
three girls, we began staidly enough at the opera, then paid ti lbute to a
succession of small Montmartre animals — dead rats, agile rabbits, and
the like. Finally, sometime in the latter morning hours, we arrived at a
Russian boite (Paris was still filled with them) called the Kazbek. Two or
three hours later, we found ourselves at war with an angry patron. T heie
were charges and counter-charges, feints and abortive strategems. We
maintained stoutly that the management had been caching empty cham-
pagne bottles in our ice buckets and counting them on the bill; the patron
counterattacked by insisting that the girls to whom he had given souve-
nir silver mugs had, in fact, stolen them. I was never clear about the
facts, except that the mugs were certainly not silver and the patron was
indubitably trying to swindle us. In the end we decided on a tactical
withdrawal, and my elder brother and I were led off by a convoy of flics
to the nearest police station.

I shall never forget my exhilaration walking down the Montmartre
streets dressed in a dinner jacket and singing songs, while our blue-coated
escorts genially entered into the fun. I o a very young man who thought
in literary terms, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and other expatriate heioes
were walking by my side. I suppose it was about eight in the morning.
Workmen were just debouching from cafes after their matutinal rum or
calvados had braced them for the day’s labors, and some joined the
procession just for the hell of it. My joy was unbounded; if this could
happen to a nineteen-year-old lad from Iowa on his second night in
Paris, think what potential the place had!

Quite as Hemingway would have written it, the police station was
filled with whores of all ages, on hand for the morning inspection. They
greeted our entrance with cries of delight. Smiles and cigarettes weie
exchanged; we were comrades against the exploiters.

Yet slowly but inexorably, doubt intruded. The police magistrate, or
whoever he was, flagrantly favored the patron , and it was clear to my
fledgling lawyer brother that we were outgunned. Since we did not want
to become an item in the Chicago Tribune , which was then publishing a
Paris edition, prudence called for a settlement. Negotiating under duress,
Stuart made a deal slightly to the windward side of capitulation. We then

The First Eighteen Years Are the Easiest 13

retraced our steps soberly — and with considerably fewer travelers’
checks — to our hotel. Under the illusion that our companions in revelry
might be anxious about our welfare, my always considerate brother tele-
phoned their hotel and spoke to the girl I had been with the previous
evening. Obviously, she had not thought well of young Middle Western-
ers who ended up in the Bastille. “I just wanted to let you know,” my
brother blithely reported, “that we got out of jail.” “Who?” my future
wife replied. It had been, as she said later, “a hell of a way to attend the
opera!”

Ruth Murdoch

Her name was Ruth Murdoch; she lived in Pittsburgh and, having
finished college, was studying painting at Carnegie Tech. I saw her the
next night in Paris; then we arranged to meet in Nice, where I made
more progress. This time I did not get arrested, and the softness of the
Mediterranean night was environmentally helpful. Finally, when we met
in Rome, the casual became serious. We wandered over the Pincian Hill,
mutually enchanted with the sculptures scattered through the garden
that surrounded an open-air cabaret. Letter writing commenced at a
frenetic pace until we could meet again in London. Then — through an
adroit rearrangement of schedules — we returned to New York on the
same ship.

I he voyage home enriched what had so far been only tentative feel-
ings. Ruth and I practiced togetherness; Ralph had a girl of his own;
while my brother Stuart, who was engaged to a girl at home (one reason
for my mother’s eagerness to push us off to Europe), spent the entire
voyage reading Eddington and Sir James Jeans. Though Stuart could
understand scientists turned philosophers, I never could. But I did
smuggle in a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses, which, in those artless days, was
regarded as a daring enterprise.

My last undergraduate year in Evanston was anticlimactic. I was too
bemused by my summer’s adventures to find the campus exciting.
Although I became president of the university poetry society and the
first editor of a new literary magazine named MS, the latter was a dismal
effort. I he title was not of my choosing; I had wanted to call it “The
Ass’s Jaw Bone” and dedicate it to the slaying of Philistines, but no one
else thought that desirable or even amusing.

My four undergraduate years were not all wasted, but I learned only
a little chemistry, even less physics, no biology or anthropology, and no
mathematics beyond integral calculus. I should have asked myself then,
as Henry Adams had done thirty years before, how I could possibly hope
to understand the twentieth century without submitting myself to the
hard discipline of the physical sciences, but I was too narrowly con-

14 Years before Pearl Harbor

cerned with the arts of expression to know how little I had to express.
That realization came later. Yet even today I temper my regret with the
consoling thought that at least I did not waste my time on the soft social
studies (I cannot call them sciences) that mislabel the obvious as arcane
by smothering simple thoughts in nonce words or in neologisms that
should have been strangled at birth.

What impresses me in looking back is the narrowness of view of my
generation. Growing up during the twenties, we cared little for the world
unfolding around us. Though we had, as children, lived through the
First World War, my friends and I thought of that first cruel blow to
Western values largely in terms of the poetry of disillusion that had suc-
ceeded the overripe chauvinism of Rupert Brooke. We read Robert
Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Sacheverell Sitwell, and the
lot, and were sad that a whole generation of England’s finest young
men had been decimated, but our thinking seems to have stopped at
that point.

We all sympathized vaguely with Sacco and Vanzetti largely because
of the poetic quality of the speech that the illiterate “poor fishmonger,’’
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, gave after his sentencing. “If it had not been for
this thing, I might have to live out my life talking at street corners to
scorning men. I would have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now
we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our
full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for
man’s understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words — our
lives — our pains — nothing! This last moment belongs to us — that agony
is our triumph .” 1

To an impressionable student in his teens, such words rendered
objective evidence unnecessary and the facts irrelevant. What business
did society have stilling such a voice? Or who could believe that a man
capable of such a noble speech could be guilty of payroll robbery? Justice
blindfolded was behaving vindictively. It was my hrst experience with
the liberal fallacy, and it took me a long time to get over it; nor have I
ever fully done so in spite of my years at the law. Even today, I have no
opinion as to whether Judge Thayer and the jury were right on the facts,
but I cannot help feeling sad that we killed the two poor radicals. Having
seen how viciously the excesses of the McCarthy years corrupted human
judgment, I am no longer confident of justice when society catches rabies
from a mad dog.

Meanwhile, of course, there was sex with a literary emphasis. Have-
lock Ellis’s Dance of Life was a prelude to bootleg copies of Ulysses and
Lady Chatterley; I even read D. H. Lawrence straight through without
experiencing, in Chesterton’s phrase, the “emetic ecstasy” that such an
overripe diet would induce today. But, over and above (or beyond) sex,
was my hrst encounter with Spengler. I accepted The Decline of the West

1 5

The First Eighteen Years Are the Easiest

as though inscribed on clay tablets and was haunted for days by the sad
lament of Paul Valery, which I ploddingly read in French: “ Nous autres
civilisations , nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles.” “Elam,
Nineveh, Babylon, Valery wrote, “were vague and beautiful names, and
the total ruin of these words has as little meaning for us as their very
existence. But France, England and Russia — these will also be beautiful
names. Lusitania is a pretty name. . . . We see now that the abyss of
history is large enough for everyone. We sense now that a civilization is
just as fragile as a life.’’ 2

I hough I now find it hard to believe, most of my student days were
during the Harding-Coolidge era, more than half a century ago. It was
a time of mindless complacency, when few foresaw that America s jerry-
built prosperity was nearly over or that, within a decade, the West would
find itself at Armageddon. I he sky was lit by a Panglossian ignis fatuus;
messenger boys were getting rich on margined stock; and bank tellers
were expanding their garages to fulfill the Hooverian prophecy of a sec-
ond family car. Had my undergraduate experience been delayed even
three years, I would have been subjected to a different environment and
I might now see the world in more sharply contrasting shades and colors.
I might even have been bitten by the germ of social consciousness just
beginning to infect the campuses — or I might not, since it is curious how
the depression influenced many students to concentrate on getting jobs
rather than converting paving stones into barricades. But since even
Northwestern eventually shed much of its Babbitt spirit, my attention
would, without doubt, have been differently focused.

What few, if any, of us foresaw in 1929 was that the locusts had been
busily eating the years, and a smug America was about to receive its
comeuppance. By the time my brothers and I had returned from Europe,
in September, the omens were everywhere, though not many people
read them properly. I he stock market had taken its first premonitory
tumble, and during the next three years, the country slipped relentlessly
into economic misery. I spent the worst of those depression years at
Noithwestern Law School, where — partially because the competition was
more serious — we absorbed ourselves in our studies, taking little interest
in politics. The Hoover Administration was, we thought, a platitudinous
bore; no doubt we would have felt more excitement had the New Deal
already begun.

Law School and Marriage

My decision to study law had not reflected any basic yearning of mine
to be called to the bar. I toyed with the thought of taking a doctorate in
English and settling down on a small campus, but, in the end, the bar
prevailed, and I never looked back. Not only did I find the law intrinsi-

1 6 Years before Pearl Harbor

cally interesting, but it also furnished me with a trade union card and a
passport that, throughout my working life, has enabled me to move eas-
ily back and forth across that prickly border between the public and
private sectors.

At law school, I was no longer an outsider, even though many of my
classmates had spent the four preceding years in Eastern universities.
Some I had known in high school; others I met for the hrst time. But
our different undergraduate backgrounds no longer kept us apart; law
school provided a community of interest, with all of us concentrating on
a single subject matter. Moreover, we were older; my companions and I
were better read than we had been four years before, and most of us
took our studies seriously, since we were training for what would pre-
sumably be a lifetime career.

During the winter of 1931, as the economy continued on its inexor-
able downward course and hardship and suffering became increasingly
conspicuous, Ruth left her art studies in Pittsburgh and signed up as a
social worker. Though untrained for the specific task, she came equipped
with compassion and intelligence compounded with hard, common sense.
Later she wrote in her family journal,

My duties were to call on families in their homes, investigate conditions and
work records, have the sick admitted to hospitals, the insane to institutions, relief
supplied if that appeared to be the last resort, and argue with real estate com-
panies who intended to evict families or seize their furniture.

I would be so tired by the end of the day, after climbing all over the hills of
Pittsburgh’s slums, that it was all I could do to write my letter to George and get
early to bed. . . .

On September 16, 1932, we were married and went off to Bermuda
on a wedding trip. In her family history, Ruth describes an episode that
tells something about the way we then approached life.

I found that my new husband was no fritterer of time or opportunity. We
were in Bermuda, therefore we should see the place. I he best way to do this was
to ride a bike. And if your bride had never learned how, this was the time to
begin.

Our ship docked at noon. We had lunch. ... We engaged two English Her-
cules bicycles with hand brakes. And by mid-afternoon, when 1 had picked myself
up out of the gutter at least twenty times, I could pedal a wobbly course from
one hill to the next and dismount on my feet instead of my face.

The next day we cycled around Harrington Sound — a mere matter of thirty
miles. . . . Arriving back at our cottage by the Inverurie Hotel, we decided there
was just about time enough before dark to pedal across to Coral Beach for a . . .
swim. It hurried us a little getting into dinner clothes afterward, but late-comers
were still being served.

I returned to law school well after the beginning of the term, leaving
Ruth in Pittsburgh to pack up her belongings while I found a place for

From Depression to War , Ploughs , and “Habbakuks” 77

us to live. With trepidation, I rented an apartment in Evanston without
her seeing it. Fortunately she fell in love with the place, and during the
months that followed I found the twin vocations of student and husband
combining felicitously. My law school comrades repeatedly — and often
unexpectedly — dropped by for meals and talk. Ruth bore with exem-
plary fortitude the fact that 1 spent most evenings studying and she
became a favorite among my classmates, for whom she provided food,
drink, and a warm welcome. From indolence or obstinacy or other
motives scarcely commendable, I refused to take notes during law school
lectures, rationalizing my self-indulgence with the unproven theory that
I could remember information best by listening intently while others
scribbled. That system, however, assumed that my friends would take
careful notes; fortunately, they did.

Employment prospects for a young lawyer were anything but bright
in the spring of 1933. Since I had an adequate academic record (law
review board and grades near the top of my class), I could be assured of
a job with a good Chicago law firm, although at a salary of not more than
one bundled dollars a month. By chance, however, another avenue
opened that had a major influence on the shape of my future life.

At the outset of his administration, President Roosevelt had asked
his Hyde Park neighbor, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., to preside over a new
agency, the Farm Credit Administration, which was a consolidation of
several bureaus engaged in making loans to farmers. Morgenthau asked
I rofessor Herman Oliphant to assist him by organizing a general coun-
sel s office. Oliphant got in touch with the deans of several law schools,
including Dean Green of Northwestern, who nominated me. Ruth and
I thought well of the project, and I accepted. I arrived in Washington in
May, i 933 > prior to my law school graduation in June. Ruth was to fol-
low a week later after she had disposed of our apartment and settled our
meager affairs. I his time she would be able to play the decisive role in
selecting our residence— a small cottage across the river in Virginia.

1. From Depression to War, Ploughs,
and “ Habbakuks ”

Washington was swarming with young lawyers, economists,
bankers, and professors-in-exile, all bent on reorganizing the cosmos,
rearranging the stars and planets. Programmed like a computer with bits
and tags of literature, I mouthed Wordsworth s famous apostrophe to
the early weeks of the French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to
be alive, /But to be young was very heaven!”

1 8 Years before Pearl Harbor

The times were ebullient, and yeast was in the air. Each morning we
awoke to read with excitement of Roosevelt s latest outrageous move. It
was epater les bourgeois in political and economic terms or — more precisely
for us — it was epater les vieillards, a form of exercise that inevitably lifts
the hearts of anyone under thirty. The old order had discredited itself;
we would conjure up a new and better one in its place. Certain lines from
Wordsworth’s Prelude expressed what we thought we were up to, for it
did indeed seem to us a time

In which the meager, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!

When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights . . .

We were, so we thought at the time, not so much interested in smash-
ing pillars and pulling down temples as in designing the shape and form
of our New Jerusalem. Discussion might circle for a time — sometimes it
seemed to circle for long alcoholic hours — but it invariably settled on the
architecture of that refulgent city.

No doubt because the actors in the drama were relatively older —
lawyers and young Ph.D.’s in economics rather than undergraduates —
the reaction bore no resemblance to the later disorder of the sixties,
when “trashing” seemed an end in itself. 1 hough we had read some
history, no one thought himself a young Robespierre. Perhaps also
because the New Deal was a fresh experience for America (though not
for Europe), with government for the first time giving explicit meaning
to the welfare clause, we felt hope in the air. Later, in the sixties, much
of the new welfare legislation served the bureaucracy more than the
commonweal, but in those days of unlimited expectations our basic credo
was simple: Nothing that had been done till then was good enough nor
was there anything we could not do if we set our minds to it.

To be sure, I was little more than a spear-carrier with few speaking
lines. Unlike many of the leading actors, I had, at that time, not even
met Felix Frankfurter, let alone clerked for Holmes or Brandeis. Most
of the problems with which the New Deal was grappling were for me
matters of first impression; I was, by any rational standard, spectacularly
ill-equipped. Although assigned to work on developing credit facilities
for the farmers, I had never, in spite of my Iowa background, spent a
night on a working farm — but then neither had my colleagues, includ-
ing, I suspect, Henry Morgenthau. That, however, did not deter us. In
the atmosphere of New Deal Washington, inexperience was no impedi-
ment; one learned fast and improvised boldly. Even professionally, I
could not have been more of a neophyte; I had never so much as written
a contract to sell a fifty-dollar dog! Yet one of my first professional tasks
was to draft and help negotiate a contract for the sale of $75 million

From Depression to War, Ploughs, and “Habbakuks” 19

worth of Federal Farm Board cotton. It was such a formidable docu-
ment seventy or eighty pages in length and replete with intricate inter-
nal brokerage arrangements— that, in retrospect, I am amazed that I was
not terrified by the assignment. But I took it in stride, as we all did in
those days. We were young and nothing was impossible.

I wo or three times during those early months I played handball at
the old Hotel Ambassador with a lawyer who was later to become a close
friend. Dean Acheson, then thirty-eight, was Acting Secretary of the
Treasury while Secretary William Woodin lay dying. Shortly afterwards,
in November 1933, he resigned over an issue of principle. Franklin
Roosevelt, bemused by some dubious advice from Professor George F.
Warren, had forbidden the private holding of gold and sought to increase
the gold price of the dollar by having the government make large gold
purchases. Acheson, quite sensibly opposing the move, responded by
resigning. Yet, abhorring vainglorious gestures, he rejected the tempta-
tion of a public row with the President that would have won him
momentary acclaim in many quarters and contented himself with a
graceful letter of resignation. 1

When, on a later occasion, Roosevelt was to rebuke another under
secretary for his flamboyant resignation, he said, . . tell him to ask
Dean Acheson how a gentleman resigns.” That remark impressed me at
the time, and I was to recall it during the dispute over Vietnam that I
shall recount in a later chapter.

With Acheson s departure from the I reasury, Roosevelt named
Morgenthau to succeed him. Morgenthau took Oliphant to be his legal
adviser and I went along with the package. It was, I quickly found, a
fortunate move, since Morgenthau, a highly suspicious man, knew almost
no one in the Treasury except Oliphant and me. Oliphant provided me
with far greater traffic with the Secretary than would otherwise have
been the case. He was the type of genius manque of whom I seem to have
met more than my share. Imaginative and intellectually resourceful, he
was unconstrained by any practical experience. Spinning elaborate the-
ories on only the briefest exposure to new situations, he disdained facts
that undercut his hypotheses. But while Oliphant was not a man of dis-
ciplined judgment, he was enormously stimulating to a young appren-
tice engaged in on-the-job training as an intellectual freebooter; besides,
he was kind to me.

Thus the months that followed were effervescent. While my job with
the Farm Credit Administration had brought me into geographical pro-
pinquity with the New Deal, my work at the Treasury touched major
phases of New Deal policy. I had a dogsbody role in preparing the briefs
supporting Roosevelt’s devaluation of the dollar by upholding the power
of Congress to require holders of government bonds denominated in
gold to accept legal tender instead. I worked on peripheral aspects of

20

Years before Pearl Harbor

the Chase Bank loan to the Soviet Union and revised the basic concep-
tual memorandum that outlined what later emerged as the Internal Rev-
enue Act of 1936 — the so-called Undistributed Profits Tax. That was
revolutionary legislation. Inspired by a proposal by Professor Gardiner
Means, an old friend of Oliphant’s, its underlying theory was that the
flagging economy could be more rapidly galvanized by increasing pur-
chasing power than by expanding investment in production goods when
existing capacity was only partially utilized. (It was the negation of sup-
ply-side economics.) Thus, the tax was designed to increase the flow of
money into consumers’ hands by providing an incentive for corporations
to distribute profits to shareholders. 2

I can only partially recreate my state of mind at the time. Astonished
to find myself engaged even tangentially in large affairs, I felt more
nearly omniscient than I ever have since. (In fact, a full appreciation of
how little I know has come to me only gradually.) Still, I could not avoid
a troubling dubiety. The supercharged atmosphere of Washington was
unreal; if I were ever to master my profession of the law, I had better
get back to the Middle West and touch the earth.

So, in April 1935, Ruth and 1 headed for Chicago. Departure was
not easy because, apart from the stimulus of my work, we had had glo-
rious weekends exploring obscure nooks and crannies in Yiiginia and
Maryland. For the hrst time, we had lived in our own house — complete
with fox terrier, fireplace, and backyard, where Ruth, an ardent gar-
dener, had conducted experiments with floriculture and grown fresh
vegetables.

Law Practice in Chicago

The Chicago law firm I chose had little to offer. I hough it had once
contained giants of the Chicago bar, 1 found it then in decline. For sev-
eral months, I was given nothing useful to do, which, after the hyperthy-
roid activity of Washington, was agonizing. (Ruth considers it the most
unhappy period of my life.) Then, gradually, I began to take court
assignments f rom the docket clerk each morning. Since these were given
out just as court sessions were beginning, there was no chance for prep-
aration. Frequently the only instruction I received was to see that the
other side’s motion — whatever it might be — was denied.

It was a travesty of serious law practice. For the first few weeks I did
not know the names of our regular clients and, hence, could not tell for
whom I was acting until counsel for the other side had spoken. I hen,
wildly improvising an argument to counter what he had said, I would
make an eloquent protest. For one who had envisaged himself shaping
history in Washington— if only in fantasy— it was a humbling and dis-
couraging assignment. Yet, in the process I suppose I did learn how to

21

From Depression to War , Ploughs , and “ Habbakuks ”

think on my feet and invent arguments — a talent that was to prove useful
on later occasions.

I spent a little more than three years with that firm, during half of
which I served as a tax lawyer. Since tax law involved the dissection of
language, the juggling of concepts, and the manipulation of logic, I
enjoyed its casuistical challenge. But, though I became reasonably adept
at standing language on its head, I felt the lack of Jesuit or Talmudic
training — either of which is ideal preparation for a tax lawyer.

By 1939 I had had enough. With the help of my close friend Carl
Spaeth (later dean of the Stanford Law School), I moved to a more active
and prestigious law firm, then known as Sidley, McPherson, Austin and
Harper. Not only did it provide a more congenial environment, but my
new work, which involved the reorganization of railroads, gave me
greater scope. Soon I discovered kindred spirits among the partners.
One was Paul Harper, the son of William Rainey Harper, the famous
president of the University of Chicago. Another was a young junior
partner named Adlai E. Stevenson, whom I had known slightly in Wash-
ington and with whom I formed a close friendship that continued until
his death thirty-five years later.

It was during this period that I first turned my attention to foreign
policy. With the world in turmoil, literature, history — and even the law —
lost much of their meaning. After the arguments that culminated in the
Neutrality Act of 1935 and the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in
1936, one could not ignore mounting evidence that the world was on a
pell-mell slide toward a deepening crisis. How could anyone espouse
isolationism, which, I thought, was both cowardly and irresponsible?
Economic depression in Germany, with one out of eight men unem-
ployed, had helped create the conditions for Hitler’s seizure of power.
Now Western weakness and myopia were encouraging the destructive
demagoguery to which he gave the ultimate expression.

Throughout this period, my wife and I faithfully attended the Friday
lunches of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, where the chair-
man, Adlai Stevenson, was gaining respectful attention for his grace, wit,
and informed views. His introductions (on which he worked hard) were
polished gems, and some of us suspected that quite as many came to
hear Adlai as to hear the featured speaker, though the director of the
council, the late Clifton Utley, played impresario to a succession of per-
sonalities who were either participants in large affairs or at least well-
informed observers.

Europe on the Eve of War

Ever since we had left Washington in 1935, Ruth and I had each year
taken a holiday in Latin America or the Caribbean — hrst in Mexico, then

22

Years before Pearl Harbor

Guatemala, the Virgin Islands, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. But in 1938 we
were eager to get back to Europe and, though it meant leaving our two-
year-old son, John, with my parents, we sailed cabin class on the Europa.
That crossing made a lasting impression on us both. Not only were we
repelled by the sterile Bauhaus decor of the ship, but we loathed even
more the prevalence of swastikas and “Heil Hitler' salutes, while the
stiff, heel-clicking arrogance of the ship’s officers was a caricature of
Prussian militarism. Through some connection we were invited to the
captain’s quarters for a drink. But when I asked to have a look at the
bridge, I was treated almost as a spy and told sternly that all the ship’s
instruments were secrets no American could possibly see.

Nor did the North German Lloyd line show subtlety in indoctrinat-
ing its captive passengers with the gospel according to Dr. Goebbels. 1 he
ship’s newspaper, the Lloyd Post, was each morning filled with blood-
curdling accounts of how the belligerent Czechs were threatening the
poor, defenseless Germans. In the issue of May 22, for example, a story
with a Prague dateline announced that the border had been closed “after
the shedding of German blood plunged this republic into the gravest
crisis since its birth and after the World War.”

On th eEuropa we met George Gamov, a brilliant astrophysicist, who,
in 1926 at the age of twenty-four, had propounded an important theory
concerning the behavior of alpha rays. Traveling with him was a Ger-
man astrophysicist named Dr. Karl Wilhelm Meissner. Formerly profes-
sor at the University of Frankfurt, he had been forced to retire in his
early forties (he was then forty-six) because he had a Jewish wife and was
a friend of Einstein’s. Gamov was on his way to a scientific conference in
Paris under League of Nations auspices; Meissner was en route to War-
saw, also to deliver a paper.

Meissner was the prototype of the kindly, thoughtful, infinitely patient
professor. In collaboration with Gamov, he taught Ruth to cut Mobius
strips and when we were on deck always insisted on lighting her ciga-
rettes with a magnifying glass to celebrate the energy of the sun. 3

Another memorable passenger — a young Austrian girl from Salz-
burg in her early twenties — had left her homeland before the Anschluss
for two years of study at the University of Minnesota and now, about to
return to a country under Nazi domination, was so filled with fury and
apprehension that she could not speak of it without crying. f inally, there
were a young Belgian assistant of August Picard, the balloonist, and a
young Englishman then in the British civil service in Khartoum, who
belonged to the cadet branch of a great noble family and had some hope
(never realized) of succeeding to an earldom.

Each evening after dinner, the group gathered to exchange anec-
dotes out of their pasts and to talk obsessively of the coming war. Our
cabin was chosen for these meetings because, being American, we could

From Depression to War, Ploughs, and “ Hahhakuks ” 23

be trusted. Since it was the first time I had found myself in an environ-
ment of brooding apprehension, I was astonished at our friends’ fear
that their own cabins might be bugged by the Gestapo. On that crossing,
I first dimly perceived the cruel visage of the coming war. It was three
months before Munich.

Once arrived in London, we hired a small Singer automobile and
traveled to Land’s End, calling en route on distant cousins in Devon,
then through the Midlands to Glasgow and Edinburgh, and as far north
as Inverness. Except for the weather — it was a typically wet summer —
the United Kingdom was a garden of quiet beauty and repose. The peo-
ple were, as always, wonderfully warm and hospitable; both Ruth and I
felt then, as we have always felt since, that the civility suf fusing the whole
of British society sets that country apart from any other. Still, it was
strangely disquieting to move from the dark menace of the Eur op a — our
“Ship of Fools, “ as I was later to think of it, with its hovering omnipres-
ence of inevitable war — to the apparently relaxed and gracious English
countryside, where one found little visible concern at the prospect of
impending conflict.

Lacking friends in more sophisticated English circles, I did not then
know of the anxiety among the enlightened few in the British govern-
ment or of the frantic efforts of valiant individuals to prepare the coun-
try for a Nazi assault. Nevertheless, when I returned to the United States,
I was convinced that Europe was heading for Armageddon and that the
United States had better stand on the Lord’s side; otherwise, Western
civilization would go down before the barbarians in Berlin.

America Enters the War

In September 1938 came Munich and the beginning of a public
argument in the United States. Those who were for preserving Ameri-
can isolationism at all costs had organized the so-called America First
Committee; others felt, as I did, that sooner or later, Western civilization
would be saved only by a united effort and that we Western peoples had
better act together while we could still mobilize our full strength. This
latter view was advanced by the Committee to Defend America by Aiding
the Allies (popularly called the William Allen White Committee), in which
Adlai Stevenson played a leading role in Chicago while I carried a spear
in the supporting cast. The fall of France left me numb and dismayed;
why were we not moving immediately to join with Britain? Holding those
views, I was deeply troubled by the attack on Pearl Harbor on December
7, 1941. Would it galvanize America into action in Europe, or would
Americans insist that their only enemy was Japan? Would we concen-
trate on the war in the Pacific, while Western Europe and Britain were
pushed against the wall? By declaring war on the United States on

Years before Pearl Harbor

24

December 1 1, Hitler resolved not only America’s predicament but mine
as well. America was now fighting Hitler, and there could be no more
business as usual. My days as a Chicago lawyer were over.

As was our custom, Ruth and I spent Christmas at our family home
in Florida, returning early in January by way of Washington so I could
talk with Adlai, who had by this time become an assistant to Frank Knox,
the Secretary of the Navy. He could, he said, arrange a commission for
me in the navy if I wanted one, but he urged me not to enter military
service; I should instead try to put my Washington experience to some
use. A brilliant young lawyer named Oscar Cox was on a continual look-
out for able lawyers to assist him in the General Counsel’s office of the
Lend-Lease Administration. Since Cox also worked closely with Harry
Hopkins, as well as with Ben Cohen and Isador Lubin in the White
House, Stevenson was sure I would find scope for my energies.

After one interview with Cox, I arranged to leave Chicago for my
second tour of duty in Washington. Oscar Cox, my new chief, had many
titles: General Counsel of the Lend-Lease Administration, counsel for
Harry Hopkins’s office in the White House, Assistant Solicitor General
(responsible for preparing legal opinions for the President), and — for
some months — counsel for Vannevar Bush, then head of the Office of
Scientific Research and Development. To carry out his manifold assign-
ments, Cox had gathered about him a collection of young and exubeiant
lawyers, including Philip Graham (later publisher of the Washington Post),
Joseph Rauh, Eugene Rostow, John Connor, Lloyd Cutler, and Daniel
Boorstin (later to become a distinguished social historian and librarian
of Congress).

During my first months with Cox, my own assignments varied from
normal Lend-Lease business to investigating the synthetic rubber pro-
gram and keeping eccentric scientists out of trouble at the request of the
White House. What gave a unifying distinction to our small band of
activists was not merely our reflexive skepticism of the conventional wis-
dom but also an uncritical commitment to our own version of unconven-
tional wisdom. We accepted as immutable principle that our military
leaders would instinctively try to fight the current war with the weapons
of the last, which led us automatically to that other shopworn aphorism
(invented by Talleyrand, attributed to Clemenceau, and quoted by
Briand) that war was too serious a business to be left to generals. We
were determined not to leave our war to the soldiers.

Pykes Projects

Only three months after 1 arrived in Washington, Oscar Cox put
Eugene Rostow and me in touch with a bearded British intellectual named
Geoffrey Pyke, who exceeded even British standards of eccentricity.

From Depression to War, Ploughs, and “Habbakuks” 25

Although still known only to a few, he had already lived a full, varied,
and eventful life, having been at one time or another a foreign corre-
spondent, the hero of a brilliant prison escape during the First World
War, an advertising agent, a commodity speculator, a pioneer in public
opinion polls, an experimental educator, a journalist, an organizer of
charities, an inventor, a self-styled economist, and a military tactician at
least as innovative as that other famous amateur, T. E. Lawrence.

Pyke was given the title of Programme Director by Admiral Mount-
batten, then Chief of Combined Operations, and he shared the famous
backroom with Professor J. D. Bernal, a highly gifted Cambridge physi-
cist (a Marxist in politics), and the zoologist, Solly Zuckerman (now Lord
Zuckerman), later to become the scientific adviser to the Prime Minister.
Rostow and I were told to visit Pyke because the Plough Project — his
most important proposal to date — was in deep trouble.

The central idea of the Plough Project, as Pyke conceived it, was that
in struggling for command of the land, sea, and air, the Allies had ignored
the potential advantage of commanding the snows. Pyke envisaged land-
ing bombers on a glacier in Norway and debouching specially designed
snow vehicles manned by small crews that could move quickly about the
country, destroying bridges, tunnels, railroad tracks, hydro-electric
installations, and other vital facilities. He devised not only the require-
ments and guidelines for the snow vehicle and the composition of the
force but also an elaborate set of tactics for delivering the force and
vehicle on target. In addition, he designed special demolition weapons,
such as explosive “snakes” to be injected in the flumes of hydro-electric
stations.

For reasons of greater security and resources, Churchill and Roose-
velt had agreed that the Plough Project should be developed in America.
But from the moment of his hrst arrival in America, Pyke’s arrogance
and impatience had critically prejudiced the project’s success. Pyke could
not write or talk without skyrocketing wit, interlarded with quotations
from Shaw, Churchill, Tolstoy, the Bible, or whatever apt epigram he
might dredge from his vast arsenal; it did not endear him to the soldiers.

In the latter part of June, Rostow and I were requested by Cox to
get Pyke’s snow project back on the track. Our essential role was to serve
as a neutralizing element while, at the same time, trying to bring about
those procedural changes necessary to make Pyke’s advice available and
effective.

In a memorandum we prepared for Cox to send to Harry Hopkins
on July 4, we pointed out the lamentable condition of the project,
emphasizing the failure to develop an adequate vehicle, since the machine
then being built ignored the requirements of the central strategy. More-
over, there had been too little research and overall planning essential to
an effective tactical operation. Because of the prevailing ignorance about

26 Years before Pearl Harbor

snow and the terrain to be encountered in Norway (no maps of gradients
had yet been prepared for the potential area of maneuver), we urged
that America should move forward with the design and development of
several possible types of vehicle — leaving the final selection to the latest
date production could begin. Meanwhile, snow studies should go urgently
forward. We recounted the history of the project, including arbitrary
decisions that had been made to adapt the design of the amphibious jeep
to a snow vehicle, a whole month lost in experimenting with an over-
weight amphibious design that could not be steered, the failure to
undertake snow research when new snow was available in North Amer-
ica in May, and so on.

Though the new snow machine (later known as the Weasel) was
never used in snow, it proved a vital instrument for enabling Allied troops
to move through the mud when, during their last convulsion, the Ger-
mans flooded the Ardennes Forest, and it turned out to be the only
conveyance that could cross the mangrove swamps in Southeast Asia.

Pyke’s imagination worked at full steam, but none of his plans was
on such a grand scale or offered so much promise as “Operation Hab-
bakuk .” 4 The scheme had its genesis in Pyke’s discovery that when small
particles of foreign substance are frozen in water, the reinforced ice has
qualities quite different from those of pure frozen water. “Pvkrete,” as
his proposed material was called, would be made from particles of wood
suspended in water and frozen into ice. It would have not only a crush
resistance greater than ice by a factor of two to twelve, but it would also
have more stability at high temperatures because the wood pulp would
insulate the Pykrete after the outer surface of the material had thawed.

In the Habbakuk Project, Pykrete would be used to construct giant
aircraft carriers, each of which would be two thousand feet long with a
forty-foot-thick hull and a displacement of two million tons. These ships
would be unsinkable not merely because of the strength and mass of the
construction material, but also because, equipped with their own refrig-
erating machines, they could, like living organisms, regenerate them-
selves by freezing more ice to fill any crater made by shell, bomb, or
torpedo. With thick Pykrete decks, they could conceal fighter planes in
their hollow interiors safe from enemy attack. The ships would have the
outward appearance not of floating icebergs but of conventional vessels,
for their hulls and flight decks would be sheathed in timber. Several feet
of insulation would separate this wooden skin from the Pykrete. With
their capacity for regeneration, they would not require new timbers to
encase craters, even in case of severe explosive damage — except, of
course, on the flight deck.

Once Mountbatten had persuaded Prime Minister Churchill to Hoat
a piece of Pykrete in his bath and observe its resistance to melting, Chur-
chill enlisted Roosevelt’s enthusiastic support for the project. There-

27

From Depression to War , Ploughs , and “Habbakuks”

after, Pykrete was involved in a now legendary incident at the Quebec
Conference in the summer of 1943, when the Allied chiefs of staff
engaged in a bitter dispute over the conduct of the war. To give time for
tempers to cool, the junior officers were sent out of the room; Lord
Mountbatten seized the occasion to demonstrate to the top Allied com-
mand the virtues of his favorite material. Two carts were rolled into the
room, one containing a cube of pure ice and the other of Pykrete. Gen-
eral u Hap” Arnold, then Chief of Staff of the United States Army Air
Corps, was handed a chopper with which he split the block of ice; when
he tried to split the Pykrete, the chopper bounced off, wrenching Arnold’s
arm. Lord Mountbatten then shattered the untreated ice with a pistol
shot but, when he Bred at the Pykrete block, the bullet ricocheted, caus-
ing both Lord Portal and Admiral King to duck.

An anecdote has emerged from this conference. A junior officer in
the anteroom, sensitive to the bitter feelings momentarily displayed by
the Allied chiefs, exclaimed with alarm, “First they argue, then they begin
hitting each other, now they’ve started shooting.”

A one-thousand-ton pilot model was built on a Canadian lake; the
experts decreed that the project was feasible, and a contract was let for
the design of the first huge vessel. 0 But before a full-size ship could be
constructed, a deal had been made with Portugal to use the Azores as a
mid-ocean air base; the “Mulberry” artificial harbors had been devised
for the invasion of Normandy; and the American campaign in the Pacific
had moved beyond the point where Habbakuk might be needed. Today,
of course, the development of nuclear weapons has rendered such a
project valueless.

My own relation with Operation Habbakuk was marginal. For a time
I knew only that Pyke had another, even more grandiose, project, and it
was some months before I learned its character. I did, however, assist
Pyke whenever he or his people sent up a distress flare, recklessly udng
the machinery of Lend-Lease credentials. The problem occasionally
became sticky-K)ne particular expert Pyke requested was an enemy alien
and another a declared Communist— but the importance of the objective
justified a considerable indiscretion. Meanwhile, Eugene Rostow main-
tained closer touch with the project at a time when I was concentrating
on other matters.

Although Pyke was a man who incited strong antipathies from many,
he inspired unflinching loyalty from a select few. Among those most
deeply committed to him was “Sandy” Wedderburn, a young British
commando officer who had been on raids in Normandy and was fully
trained in the art of strangulation with thin wires and other more silent
and subtle means of eliminating intruders. At times his absorbing pas-
sion to win the war posed an awkward problem for Rostow and me.
Whenever a particularly obtuse soldier or civilian jeopardized either of

28 Years before Pearl Harbor

Pyke’s enterprises by insensitive opposition or foot-dragging, Wedder-
burn would quietly offer to remove the obstacle neatly and quietly, leav-
ing no incriminating evidence. He seemed disappointed at our negative
response. Though Rostow and 1 both prided ourselves on skill at
bureaucratic combat, we used the word “infighting’ in a metaphorical
sense; Wedderburn’s approach was too literal for our taste.

Still later, 1 was informed that Wedderburn had been killed falling
through a stairwell onto a marble floor of a palazzo in which he had been
billeted in Naples — which, if the report was correct, seemed an unlikely
fate for a skilled mountain climber. Trained as a writer-to-the-signet (a
class of Scottish lawyer) in Edinburgh, Wedderburn was a young man of
exceptional qualities. A tribute to him in the Times of March 13, 1945,
pointed out that he had physical problems of which I was totally unaware:
“. . . at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, ... he was President of the Cambridge
University Mountaineering Club. During one meet he severely strained
his heart helping to rescue a climber from another club. I bis began a
disability from which he suffered considerably in later years. . . . All his
energy was devoted to whatever tasks confronted him, and he accom-
plished them by sheer ‘guts.’ How many students at the school in Iceland
or the troops of both the Navy and Army who were at some pet iod
under his command realized that the apparently fit and tireless officei
was suf fering from a weak heart, severe asthma and a gastric ulcet which
periodically necessitated his living on bread and milk?”

I heard that Pyke had been shattered by Wedderburn’s death and it
may have contributed to his own suicide on January 22 , 1945- ^ event
evoked an impressive obituary in the Times that spoke of Pyke as “one of
the most original, if unrecognized, figures of the present century.

That the world needs more Geoffrey Pykes seems clear, particularly
now, when transient intellectual fads increasingly tend to dominate
thought. Yet pestiferous characters such as Pyke and Socrates are
understandably unwelcome. It is damned annoying to have impertinent
questions asked and comforting assumptions undercut particularly by
someone armed with both logic and corrosive wit. Is not the human con-
dition sufficiently absurd without anyone pointing it out through satiri-
cal comment? And does that not assure that hemlock, which has been
used literally and metaphorically for at least two thousand years, will
remain in society’s materia medica for the next thousand.-'

PART II

The War
Years

\ Lend-Lease and the Avoidance of
War Debts

Apart from such marginal activities as looking after stray
British intellectuals and doing chores for the White House, my regular
assignment during 1942 and 1943 was to serve as operating head of the
General Counsel’s office of the Lend-Lease Administration, and thus
legal adviser to the Administrator of Lend-Lease, Edward R. Stettinius.
The handsome son of a Morgan partner, Stettinius had held impressive
titles with both General Motors and United States Steel, but, as I quickly
discovered, his primary corporate role had been ornamental. A man of
good will, he was ill-equipped to cope with the subtle and complex diffi-
culties inherent in supply arrangements with allies bedevilled by their
own problems.

Stettinius wanted things to look right no matter how much disarray
might lie beneath the surface. Once, when he and I were in the Senate
gallery during a debate on one of the Lend-Lease extension bills, I men-
tioned a press rumor then current that the President might choose him
as his running mate for Vice-President. His face lit up and he said with
rapture in his voice, “George, if I ever did get to be Vice-President and
preside over the Senate, do you know what I’d do first? Look at the
shape this place is in; I’d have it painted.” Nor did he ever waver in that
instinct; the first thing he did when he later became Under Secretary of
State was to subject the old State Department building to a thorough
cleaning and repainting.

Stettinius had surrounded himself with decent and agreeable men,
several of whom had come with him from his private endeavors, and
they shared his view of our task as an exercise in public relations. Because

jo The War Years

of Stettinius’s premature white hair, which gave him an appearance of
distinction, it is not surprising that when he later took several of these
old friends with him to the State Department, the entourage was promptly
nicknamed “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” 1 hat the Lend-Lease
Administration lacked strong leadership was unfortunate, since the issues
were important. Had the top management been sufficiently aware of the
substantive problems in Lend-Lease, my lawyer colleagues and I would
have felt less of a mission to shape policy from the side.

The Problem of Definition

Prior to the Lend-Lease Act, all procurement had been handled under
the so-called cash-and-carry system; thus, by the time the act was passed
on March 22, 1941, Britain’s gold and dollar reserves had been reduced
to $12 million. 1 With the new legislation, our Allies no longer needed to
deplete their meager foreign exchange; supplies would be regularly
forthcoming, with accounts ultimately to be settled by “payment or
repayment in payments of property or any other direct or indirect ben-
efit which the President deemed satisfactory.” Such language shifted the
authority to decide the repayment question from the Congress to the
President. But, until there was common agreement on fundamental
principles, the shape of a future settlement remained a brooding con-
cern of the recipient countries. President Roosevelt had thought little
beyond his analogy of the fire hose. If your neighbor’s house catches fire
and you know that the fire will spread to your own house unless it is put
out, will you not, asked the President, lend your hose to your neighbor?

But that parable, though useful, evaded the hard issues. What if the
fire hose were consumed in the blaze? Would the neighbor have to pay
for it? That was a legitimate question when the act was drafted and
passed; then the United States was not at war with Germany. But once
we were at war, our house was as much on fire as Britain’s, and our
neighbor was using our hose to fight a common conflagration. I hus there
was now a compelling reason to redefine relationships. What our com-
mon predicament required was that each Ally join in the common effort
and do all it could. If the United States was contributing the most in
material, Britain had contributed far more in the loss of its young men
and the destruction of its property. In the final analysis, what difference
did it make whether an American tank was used by British, Australian,
or our own forces, so long as it was used effectively against the common
enemy?

Rostow and I agreed early that the situation needed a clearly enun-
ciated concept of “pooling,” but was America prepared for it:' Even as
late as February 1942, a national poll showed that 75 percent of Ameri-
cans thought Britain should pay for the war materials we supplied under

Lend-Lease and the Avoidance of War Debts 31

Lend-Lease. By July, when the question was asked differently, only 39
percent felt that Britain should pay for all the materials while 43 percent
wanted payment (or part. 2 Unhappily, the top officials of the Lend-Lease
Administration showed even less comprehension of basic issues than the
public. With experience limited to commercial banking and industry,
they thought of Lend-Lease in the same terms as the loans J. P. Morgan
had arranged for the Allied powers during the First World War. Some
of them were, as I saw it, quite capable of repeating Calvin Coolidge’s
fatuous comment: “They hired the money, didn’t they?”

The Politics of a Lend-Lease Settlement

More sophisticated officials elsewhere in the government displayed a
different bias. They saw Lend-Lease as a lever that could help them
shape a postwar economic environment free of the restrictive commer-
cial policies of the between-wars period that had turned the trading world
into a jungle.

America and its European Allies had made a dreadful mess follow-
ing the First World War. At the Versailles Conference, the economic fate
of the world had been left to pompous men with the mentality of money
changers. Now wiser heads were not only drawing blueprints for a uni-
versal organization to keep the peace (which took final shape in the
United Nations Charter), but were also seeking to create a regime of
liberal finance and nondiscriminatory multilateral trade. Unhappily,
pressure for liberalization collided with the British system of empire
preferences provided by the Ottawa agreements that had been created
in response to America’s high tariffs.

I his collision produced severe tensions during the formulation of
our Lend-Lease settlement arrangements with the United Kingdom. Even
farsighted British who felt time running out on the empire hoped to
keep together a Commonwealth that could mobilize and focus the com-
bined resources of the former colonies under London’s benign direc-
tion. President Roosevelt, on the other hand, foresaw— and desired—
the end of the colonial era. Not only did he dislike the great systems of
power by which European nations held sway over vast areas and popu-
lations around the world, he instinctively knew that those systems could
not survive the two world wars that had undercut the metropolitan bases
of power and crumbled the social and economic structures that made
colonialism possible.

There was thus little patience in the Roosevelt Administration with
maintaining preferential commercial arrangements just to help keep the
Commonwealth together. I hey were, as we saw it, incompatible with the
nondiscriminatory multilateral trade that Americans considered indis-
pensable to a prosperous world economy.

j2 The War Years

Parallel with the issue of liberal trade was that of a liberal financial
regime. The Nazis, under the tutelage of Dr. Horace Greely Hjalmar
Schacht, had utilized not only discriminatory trading practices but also
tight monetary controls, blocked accounts, and complex bilateral
arrangements to advance their own selfish purposes. Our effort to lib-
eralize trade must, therefore, be paralleled by institutions that would
make possible the free movement of capital. Yet that, again, was easier
for some nations than for others. Emerging from the war as the domi-
nant economic and financial power, America was amply equipped to
flourish in an environment of free trade and liberal finance, yet our
principal Allies — and that included Great Britain, with whom most of
the common planning was being done — were deeply in debt and facing
vast problems of reconstruction. Obviously, they were strongly tempted
by import restrictions and bilateral deals.

The element needed to resolve this problem was, as we saw it, some
assurance that America would forgo a material quid pro quo in settling
Lend-Lease accounts. In addition, we needed to make clear our inten-
tion to provide ample help to our Allies in the postwar period so they
could make the adjustments and survive the pressures and dislocations
entailed in the move toward a liberal trading and monetary regime.

But few were willing to discuss the problems of the settlement and
of postwar assistance until after we had beaten the Germans. For the
moment, major effort was concentrated on assuring that the great trad-
ing nations would not again pursue “beggar-thy-neighbor” tactics but
would opt for liberal trading and financial policies. Thus, on February
23, 1942, the United States concluded an agreement with the British
government that, in Article VII, tied the broad principles of a Lend-
Lease settlement to an agreement on multilateralism. There should be,
it provided, agreed upon action by the United States and Great Britain
“directed ... to the elimination of all forms of discriminatory treatment
in international commerce, and to the reduction of tariffs and other trade
barriers.” By way of inducement, the United States also agreed that the
benefits to be received as compensation by the United States should be
“such as not to burden commerce between the two countries but to pro-
mote mutually advantageous economic relations between them and the
betterment of worldwide economic relations.” The negotiation of Article
VII was handled by the Department of State, with Assistant Secretary of
State for Economic Affairs Dean Acheson taking the lead.

Consistent with our agreement with Britain (which was the pattern
for agreements with other Lend-Lease recipients), my lawyer colleagues
and I in the Lend-Lease Administration wanted a clear definition of the
Lend-Lease concept that would make bookkeeping largely irrelevant.
To achieve this, we depended heavily on the most effective instrument
available to us: the reports that the Lend-Lease Administration was

Lend-Lease and the Avoidance of War Debts 5 5

required to send Congress every ninety days, which were transmitted by
Presidential letter. Because we lawyers drafted those reports, we could
use them to gain legitimacy for positions and approaches we might be
advocating at the time.

Attempt at a Statement of Policy

The first time we achieved an expression of major policy was on June
1 1, 1942, in the “Fifth Lend-Lease Report”; Eugene Rostow, as the prin-
cipal draftsman, lucidly spelled out the concept of pooling and the
equality of effort. The report stated that “If each country devotes roughly
the same part of its national production to the war, then the financial
burden of war is distributed equally among the United Nations in accor-
dance with their ability to pay.”

This point was emphasized further in the President’s transmittal let-
ter, which Rostow also drafted. “Each United Nation is contributing to
the ultimate victory not merely its dollars, pounds, or rubles but the full
measure of its men, its weapons, and its productive capacity.”

The principles enunciated in the “Fifth Lend-Lease Report” were, it
seemed to us, fundamental. Yet we still wanted a more explicit statement
from the President regarding the repayment issue, since both Congress
and the American people were in sore need of education and British
anxieties about their postwar situation needed to be allayed in the inter-
est of rational planning.

Our most pressing worry, after all, was to make sure that — once the
war was won — we would not repeat the mistakes of the 1920s, draining
Europe of resources on the holy principle of the sanctity of debt. For us,
the most instructive book — ignored at the time in Washington — was
Keynes’s brilliant and prophetic essay The Economic Consequences of the
Peace , which had accurately predicted the disastrous results of Western
Europe’s insistence on reparations and America’s demand for debt
repayment. In fact, I recently came across a notebook I used during that
period, on the front cover of which I had pasted Keynes’s words: “The
existence of the great war debt is a menace to financial stability every-
where. . . . We shall never be able to move again, unless we can free our
limbs from those paper shackles. A general bonfire is so great a necessity
that unless we can make it an orderly and good-tempered affair in which
no serious injustice is done to anyone, it will, when it comes to the last,
grow into a conflagration that may destroy much else as well.” 3

But if Keynes’s dark, prophetic work was our Bible, it was by no
means the sacred book of others in the Lend-Lease Administration. When
I mentioned his work to my business colleagues, most of them had never
heard of it. Because of this pervasive ignorance of what then seemed the
transcendental realities, I thought I should try to use the President’s

34 The War Years

letter transmitting the “Eleventh Lend-Lease Report” to condition Con-
gress and the American people not to expect repayment. I therefore
asked my deputy, Alfred E. Davidson, to prepare a draft of the report
making this point, as well as a proposed letter of transmittal. After not-
ing that the Allies were growing stronger because each was contributing
to the common struggle in accordance with its ability and its resources,
our transmittal letter continued, “Everything that all of us have is dedi-
cated to victory over the Axis powers. The Congress, in passing and
extending the Lend-Lease Act, made it plain that the United States wants
no new war debts to jeopardize the coming peace. Victory and a secure
peace are the only coin in which we can be repaid” (Italics added.) If the
President accepted this language, it would, I thought, sharply focus the
issue; if the President rejected it, at least we would have tried.

With these thoughts in mind, I passed our draft briefly by Stettinius,
who, perhaps not understanding its implications, sent it on to the White
House. There, Isador Lubin, Harry Hopkins’s assistant, flagged the key
passage and forwarded it to Hopkins, who was at that time with Presi-
dent Roosevelt at the Quebec Conference. Since Hopkins did not react
against it, the message was forwarded to the Congress. For the moment,

I felt elated to have put the Administration on record that we would not
treat Lend-Lease obligations as war debts, and I did not anticipate the
storm that followed. Hopkins had apparently not taken specific note of
the language and had failed to mention it to the President. Roosevelt,
when he learned of it, was f urious.

Our original letter, bearing the President’s signature, had gone for-
ward on August 25, 1943. In a press conference on September 7, the
President publicly repudiated the two sentences on which we had put
the most value. A mistake had, he said, been made for which he was
apologizing. While he had been in Quebec, he told the press, several
drafts of a letter of transmittal were prepared “and on one of the drafts
somebody said I approved it. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t seen any of
the drafts, and the verbal statement that I had approved it — which I
hadn’t — went into type, and in type as “Franklin D. Roosevelt,” not a
signature. And as such it was sent to the Clerk of the Senate and the
Clerk of the House and released.” When he did see it, he went on, there
were only two sentences he objected to. I hey were: “The Congress, in
passing and extending the Lend-Lease Act, made it plain that the United
States wants no new war debts to jeopardize the coming peace. Victory
and a secure peace are the only coin in which we can be repaid.”

The President acknowledged that there was “a very large element of
truth” in the sentences, but said he took them out because they con-
tained only a condensation of the truth that might be widely miscon-
strued. He went on,

Lend-Lease and the Avoidance of War Debts 35

For instance, “new war debts to jeopardize the coming peace.” What is a
debt."' Is it money, or is it goods, or is it some other benefit? And the way it’s put
here, it doesn t do justice to the whole situation. It is perfectly true that in
the narrow technical sense we want no new war debts, but at the same time the
. . . Lend Lease Act does mean that other nations operating with us in its admin-
istration will repay us as far as they possibly can. Now that doesn’t mean neces-
sarily dollars, because there are all kinds of other repayments which can be made.
Therefore, the sentence is not . . . clear.

I he same way, “Victory and a secure peace are the only coin in which we can
be repaid. W ell, a great many people in this country think of a coin as some-
thing that you will jangle in your . . . pocket, and of course in the large sense
there are all kinds of coins. I wouldn’t have put it that way if I had had a chance
to see it before it was printed.

Now, that’s . . . literally all that happened. . . . They thought I had approved
it — I never saw it — so it was printed. 4

Following that statement, on September 24, the President sent Con-
gress a revised version of his letter, with the two offending sentences
deleted. It was perhaps the first time in history that the White House
had withdrawn a Presidential letter. Such is the background of this
curious incident, which, so far as I know, has never" been publicly
explained. At the time, it was taken for granted in journalistic and polit-
ical circles that Roosevelt had launched a trial balloon that he had shot
down when he found it would not fiy past Capitol Hill. Thus history is
writ.

As might be expected, the President’s action in withdrawing the con-
troversial language did not pass unnoticed by our Allies. Th e Economist
of September 1 1, 1943, interpreted it as meaning that

I he I lesident of the United States has made a little-noticed concession to
Congress which may, conceivably, have large implications — in view of the drift
of American politics from the President’s earlier ideas. . . . The comment that it
is a matter of strategic accident, and therefore a poor basis for financial reckon-
ing, whether munitions made by one Ally are employed in battle by its own
forces or those of another country might possibly be dismissed as special plead-
ing 01 restricted perhaps in its application to the 21 months during which the
United States has been itself a belligerent. . . .

Memories are still vivid of the way in which world trade and the international
exchanges were bedeviled after the last war by war debts— and by the high
Amei ican taiiff, which, in the last resort, made repayment impossible, however
good the will. I he L nited States has to show that, this time, it will be possible for
its debtors to acquire the dollars, or to sell the goods, required to balance the
account when it is finally reckoned.

In retrospect, I do not regret our attempt to clarify American pol-
icy only that we failed. There is ample evidence that the deleted sen-
tences would have been useful. Only a few months earlier, in March

3 6 The War Years

1943, Professor Eugene Staley had written a perceptive article in the
American Economic Review in which he had concluded: It would be a wise
action if the President, acting under the broad powers delegated to him
in the Lend-Lease Act, were to wipe the slate clean of obligations for
repayment on account of Lend-Lease deliveries, including those made
before Pearl Harbor. This he could do by proclaiming that effective use
of Lend-Lease supplies in ways which contribute to defeat of the Axis
will be deemed a sufficient ‘benefit’ to the United States." 5

I had not seen Staley’s article at the time we made the aborted attempt
to accomplish exactly what he recommended. That Davidson and I were
right is confirmed by Professor (later, Ambassador) Richard N. Gardner
in his definitive history of the period, Sterling-Dollcir Diplomacy. Wiiting
about the event, he says with respect to the payment for articles con-
sumed in the war, “The Lend-Lease Act, it may be recalled, had been
deliberately vague on this point. Once the United States entered the war,
full acceptance of the pooling concept should have prompted a declara-
tion that no bill would ever be tendered for the provision of war sup-
plies. In fact, abortive attempts were made to do this." He then cited our
letter and continued, that it was “. . . the last time during the course of
the war that the Administration sought to make a direct approach to the
repayment question. Accordingly, the United Kingdom and other coun-
tries had no assurance in planning their postwar trade policies that they
would be entirely free from the burden of war debts owing to the United
States.” 8

In speculating about why the President hesitated to clarify the repay-
ment question, Professor Gardner suggests two influences. I he first is
that leading figures in the State and Treasury Departments were reluc-
tant to surrender the bargaining power of Lend-Lease indebtedness in
persuading the United Kingdom to embrace a policy of multilateral tiade.
Yet the British had already gone far toward the acceptance of the prin-
ciples we were urging, and we outraged many in the United Kingdom
by linking the acceptance of those principles to the Lend-Lease settle-
ment.

Professor Gardner’s second point is more speculative. The President,
he suggests, feared the reaction of Congress, particularly after the con-
servative trend in the Congressional elections of 1942, and was not pre-
pared at the time to bring the issue of repayment to a head. That may
well be; yet it may simply have been that the President never wished to
give away any leverage he might later And useful.

Varied Lend-Lease Duties

The question of settlement was, of course, only one of many matters
that occupied our small enclave of lawyers. Apart from the often exotic

37

Lend-Lease and the Avoidance of War Debts

assignments that fell our way because Oscar Cox wore so many hats,
guiding the Lend-Lease program involved many activities. We had a hand,'
for example, in drafting, negotiating, and interpreting the Soviet pro-
tocols and in helping to resolve the multitude of difficulties that arose in
our always prickly relations with the Soviet Union. One of the more del-
icate of those problems, as I recall, was an attempted extortion by the
agents ol an important American shipping line, which, against strong
cautionary advice, we insisted on exposing.

We also provided arguments to be used when the Lend-Lease
Administration acted as advocate for our Allies before the various allo-
cation agencies: the War Production Board, army, navy. Maritime Com-
mission, Agriculture Department, and Treasury. We helped plan a special
currency for use during the post-occupation period. We helped devise
the patent interchange agreements required when intricate equipment
and machinery were transferred from one Ally to another— a chore of
monumental complexity. We developed what were known as “knock-
for-knock agreements to make it possible for ship repair services to be
provided on a reciprocal basis to American ships by the United Kingdom
and to United Kingdom ships by the United States. We largely invented
the concept of reverse Lend-Lease, under which Australia and the United
Kingdom provided goods and services to the United States on the same
basis as our assistance to them.

The Foreign Economic Administration

Vet we woi ked not so much as part of the Lend-Lease Administra-
tion as tlnough and around it. Our small cabal of lawyers was convinced
that the management of the agency was beyond redemption; the only
way to bring our Lend-Lease activities within the framework of a coher-
ent foreign economic policy was, as we saw it, to abolish the Lend-Lease
Administration as then constituted. Since the Office (formerly Board) of
Economic Warfare was also in a state of disarray, why not combine the
two agencies? The Office of Economic Warfare concentrated on such
matters as preemptive buying in order to deny key products and mate-
iials to the enemy, while the Lend-Lease Administration screened pro-
curement requisitions for Lend-Lease products and generally formulated
Lend-Lease policy. Both agencies needed to be operated with a common
strategy, while savings and efficiencies could be achieved by combining
various service functions.

So we quietly conspired with friends in the Budget Bureau, which
was responsible for the structure of wartime agencies, and, in collabo-
lation with them, evolved a plan for a merged organization to be known
as the Foreign Economic Administration. What we could not control was
the selection of a leader for the new entity. Since Stetdnius had already

3<? The War Years

gone to the State Department as Under Secretary, leaving the Lend-
Lease post to a caretaker, we very much hoped the President would install
someone of competence with whom we could work effectively.

I well remember my sense of profound shock, therefore, when it was
announced that Leo T. Crowley would head the new Foreign Economic
Administration. Although Crowley was spectacularly unequipped by
training, comprehension, or temperament for the job, Roosevelt (no
doubt in a puckish mood) described him as “the best administrator in or
out of government.” With his limited background — a small-town banker
and politician in Wisconsin — Crowley knew nothing about the economic
needs of our Allies and seemed quite indifferent to their problems so
long as he avoided trouble with Congress. I well recall his initial testi-
mony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee under the chair-
manship of the colorful Sol Bloom. He began his opening statement in
the customary way: “My name is Leo T. Crowley, and I am the chairman
of the Federal Economic Administration.” While those of us accompany-
ing him cringed, he continued quite unaware of his mistake, mumbling
through the remarks we had carefully prepared, in which the name was
properly written, yet still repeating “Federal Economic Administration.
At the end, casting his statement aside, he made his apologia to the com-
mittee. “No doubt this agency has made a lot of mistakes,” he said, “but
you’ve got to remember one thing — it’s impossible to get first-rate people
to work on these matters while the war’s going on” — an inspiring contri-
bution to the morale of his staff and colleagues.

At that point, those of us who had been arranging the hearing
resorted to a heavy-handed maneuver. 1 had told Chairman Bloom at
the outset of the hearing that we wanted the committee to hear a special
witness who was based in London and was in Washington only for the
day. But to have the benefit of his testimony the committee would have
to go into executive session, since his testimony would be highly sensi-
tive. Normally, the suggestion that his committee was about to hear
something secret would have been an enticement, but not on the first
day of the annual Lend-Lease hearings. The press was present in full
force, and Bloom was counting on the headlines, which, with his back-
ground in show business, he particularly relished. After all, the annual
Lend-Lease authorization was then the principal business to come before
the Foreign Affairs Committee, and he wished to make the most of it.

But we did not dare let the committee have a free go at Leo Crowley.
He knew nothing about Lend-Lease, had no comprehension of its
underlying philosophy, and would almost certainly make comments that
would cause us trouble in the future. Thus, as soon as Crowley had fin-
ished his statement, I asked that the committee go into executive session,
enormously inflating the importance and interest of the secret testimony
that would, 1 insisted, be available only on that day.

Lend-Lease and the Avoidance of War Debts 39

Grumbling and irritated, Chairman Bloom finally complied, but what
followed was a disaster. I hough the surprise witness had, I thought,
been fully coached, he either misunderstood our tactic or was not sym-
pathetic with it. Rather than telling the committee anything secret, he
gave them a bland, rather halting and thoroughly uninteresting descrip-
tion of his activities. The committee asked him a few half-hearted ques-
tions, and that was the end of it. It was a lamentably bad show. I paid a
high cost for the maneuver in terms of my relations with Chairman Bloom
and the committee, but it was still worth it. By the time our secret witness
had finished, the press had grown tired of waiting, while during our
witness s dull statement, various committee members had themselves
drifted off. When the committee next resumed, we put on a witness
more experienced than Crowley.

Among those of us close to the situation during that curious period,
Crowley stories are a cherished legacy, including the day he mistook
George S. Messersmith, the American ambassador to Mexico, for the
Mexican ambassador to the United States. While laboring under that
misapprehension, he spoke to Messersmith in extravagant praise of the
cooperation we were receiving from Mexico and the Mexican govern-
ment, once the mistake was called to his attention, he turned to Messer-
smith and denounced the Mexicans and their government in scatological
terms.

Cuban Mission

In spite of Crowley’s inadequacies as a manager, much less a leader,
the consolidation of the two wartime agencies had an inherent logic.
Moreover, responsibility for the legal problems of the combined institu-
tion greatly expanded my own scope of action. One particularly memo-
rable episode was a mission to Havana. It marked the first time I had
evei participated in a full-dress negotiation with a foreign government
in its own capital, and it gave me a thoroughly mistaken idea of what
international diplomacy was all about.

I he mission came about in December 1943, because Justice James
A. Byrnes (who had resigned from the Supreme Court on October 3,
1942, to become Director of Economic Stabilization) was disturbed at the
lack of progress of the synthetic rubber program. What was needed, he
decided, was a forceful effort to stop the Cubans from converting
molasses into bad gin; instead, they should turn it into alcohol for pro-
ducing rubber tires.

A team was, therefore, appointed to negotiate with the Cuban gov-
ernment, and I was sent along as counsel and chief adviser. Since Sidney
Scheuer, the chairman of our mission, had spent his life in the textile
business, his manners and methods had been shaped in a specialized

40 The War Years

milieu. Although bright, ingenious, ancl capable of whimsical charm, he
had little respect for diplomatic protocol and approached the task as
though he were raising money lor a charity drive. His game plan was
anything but subtle. “I’m goin to do a hand-painted job on those Cuban
bastards,” he told me on the flight to Havana. “They’re goin' to know
they didn’t get no bargain.” And he kept his word. In a grandiloquent
opening speech to the Cuban negotiators, headed by the Pi ime Ministei ,
he declaimed, “All of you know there’s a war on and we’re in it together
and you’ve got to do your share. You’ve got to give till it hurts, and I ve
come to see that you do.”

Although by diplomatic standards the language was unusual, my
leader had such a guileless manner that no Cuban took offense, and only
the younger members of the American delegation showed even the trace
of a smile. Indeed, once the Cubans had adjusted to a Seventh Avenue
rather than a Foggy Bottom style of diplomacy, they seemed vaguely
embarrassed by their own flamboyant brand of Hispanic rhetotic. In any
event, we soon settled down to the kind of protracted haggle that came
naturally to both the Cubans and my colorful leader. Although everyone
enjoyed the bazaarlike atmosphere that pervaded our proceedings (I
indulged in the fantasy that the green baize table had by some miracu-
lous transmogrification become a counter in a small souk), we still made
painfully little progress. By the end of the second day, it was cleat that
the Cubans were playing games, quite unconvinced that the United States
was serious about the harsh sanctions that, we implied, would be imposed
if they did not come round to our position. Some further element of
persuasion was plainly needed.

Our ambassador to Cuba, a seasoned operator named Spruille Bra-
den, had cautioned us when we first arrived not to place or receive any
telephone calls through the switchboard of the Hotel Nacional since
they would be intercepted and promptly turned over to the Cuban
negotiators. That gave me an idea. When our negotiations appioached
a dead end, I began to fly each evening to Miami. Once there, I would
telephone Stettinius or Cox over an untapped line and dictate a message
Stettinius should give me in a telephone call to the Hotel Nacional at the
appointed hour the next day.

“We’re getting damned angry,” I would have him say. “Make it clear
we’re not fooling and we’re going to get really tough if those ungrateful
Cuban bastards won’t help with the war. If you don’t get anywhere in
the next forty-eight hours. I’m going to pull you all back; you ie not
going to enjoy it, but the goddamned Cubans are going to hate it even
worse.” That was the theme he would repeat with mounting emphasis
each day, sometimes adding for special effect, I talked with the Presi-
dent this morning, and he’s furious. He’s irritated with you for being
chicken, and I’ve never seen him more angry at another government.

Lend-Lease and the Avoidance of War Debts 41

Having arranged for my daily message, I would get a good night’s
sleep, then fly back to Havana in the morning. To explain my curious
nocturnal departures, I dropped vague hints of a girl in Miami and even
showed one of the Cubans a photograph that not only improved the
respect with which I was treated but gave my story verisimilitude with
our Latin antagonists.

1 ime vindicated my petty stratagem. Each day as we appeared with
studiously worried faces, the Cubans seemed increasingly upset. The pace
of progress materially improved, and they finally gave us the concessions
we wanted. I hat they had gotten the word I know, for I asked one of
the leaders of the Cuban negotiating team about it many years later,
when he was an emigre living in New York — after Castro had taken over.
\ou mean, he asked in a shocked voice, “that those messages were
arranged? My God, they scared the hell out of us; they almost brought
the government down!”

The lesson to be drawn, for purposes of this morality play, is that
gentlemen do not always profit from “reading one another’s mail,” as
Henry L. Stimson described the interception of messages when he shut
down the American Black Chamber in 1929. 7 Had the Cubans not been
deflected from their original instinct of standing firm, they could no
doubt have continued to coin money by flooding America with filthy
tasting gin; I doubt they would have suffered for it. As for myself, well,

I had two motives for stopping the traffic: patriotism and a respect for
good liquor.

Departure for England

1 he Cuban mission was one of the last chores I undertook for the
Foreign Economic Administration. Although Crowley was always cour-
teous to me, I became convinced that I could not work with him in good
conscience; on August 21, 1944, I resigned. General “Hap” Arnold, the
commanding general of the United States Air Force, had asked me to
serve as the civilian member of the board of air force officers being
established in London to study the effectiveness of the Allied air offen-
sive. That invitation had been arranged by Fowler Hamilton, a brilliant
young lawyer whom I had met some years earlier and who, together with
the distinguished New York lawyer, Elihu Root, Jr., had helped the air
force select bombing targets.

No doubt my decision was influenced by self-indulgence. My options
were either to go into uniform, where, as I saw it, I could have provided
little more than another pair of hands for a rifle (although I could have
arranged a commission had I chosen), or to undertake a civilian job for
the air force that would take me directly to the European theater, where
I might apply my experience with useful results. Either choice was, of

42 The War Years

course, difficult for my family, which then consisted of Ruth and two
young sons, John (age eight) and Douglas (age five). Still, I was eager to
be closer to the war— more, I suspect, from curiosity than patriotism,
although motives are hard to sort out — and I knew enough of the phi-
losophy of strategic bombing to believe that I could help make an objec-
tive appraisal of what it had accomplished.

4 . The Bombing Survey

I left for London on September 4, 1944, shortly after the lib-
eration of Paris, to join my fellow members of the Air Force Evaluation
Board, under the chairmanship of Major General Jacob Fickel. Fickel,
then sixty-one years old, had been drawn out of retirement by the war.
His principal claim to fame was that he had been the first to shoot a
firearm from an airplane in flight. With pride, he handed me a picture
of that historic event; it showed a young junior officer, wearing a hunt-
ing cap and aiming a deer rifle from the lower wing of an early biplane.
He was a pleasant and courteous man, but his major value to the Air
Force Evaluation Board was his right to a Packard automobile and the
access to high places available to one of his rank. Nor were the other
board members much better equipped for the task.

The Evaluation Board was then camping out in a once elegant
Edwardian townhouse on the south side of Grosvenor Square Eisen-
hower Platz,” as it was then called by the British, since it had become the
center of American activities. That was, however, only a temporary
location, since the Board had already decided to move to the outskirts
of Paris, closer to where our side had actually dropped bombs. I he
relocation seemed essential to the other Board members, whose concern
was largely limited to measuring bomb craters so as to ascei tain the det-
onating effect of various types of explosives; they seemed little inter-
ested in the effect of bombing on the enemy economy.

The focus of the study came as a shock to me. I had assumed that
the Board would try to assess the damage our bombing had inflicted on
the enemy’s total war-making capacity, which would obviously entail an
exhaustive study of how the Germans mobilized their industry and society
for war and how they had adjusted to our attacks. But that was light
years beyond the capabilities of the feeble organization I found floun-
dering about in London. The kinds of specialists I had envisaged (first-
class economists, engineers, industrialists, statisticians, public opinion
experts, scientists, and so on) could never have been leciuited to serve
under such a Board, and even if they had been assembled, the Board,

The Bombing Survey 43

as constituted, would have had not the vaguest idea what to do with
them.

Another problem was that, in the nature of things, the air force could
not appraise its own achievements objectively. The central object of our
study, as I saw it, was to determine whether America had judiciously
allocated its resources. Could we have won the war more quickly by com-
mitting more or less effort and material to the air offensive at the expense,
or to the benefit, of our ground or naval forces?

Annoyed that I had blundered into such a frustrating situation, I
told my new colleagues that I would remain in London for a week while
they went on to the Continent. Meanwhile, I intended to determine as
well as possible what shape a serious study should take and how it could
be organized. Remaining with me was a young captain, a statistician in
civilian life, who had been with the Board since its inception and shared
my perceptions of its total inadequacy. With his help and the advice of
othei ft iends then in London, I drew up an elaborate organization chart
to show how to put together a competent study, responsible not to the
ait force but to the Secretary of War and staffed with experts capable of
assessing the behavior under bombing of all aspects of the German econ-
omy.

I ctossed the channel on an LSI , then accompanied a convoy of
jeeps to Paris — displaying my disdain for military customs by staying in
hotels along the way. After first checking in with my colleagues, who
were uncomfortably ensconced in temporary offices in the stables (Les
Gtandes Ecuries) of the Versailles Palace, 1 obtained permission from
General ‘ Looey” Spaatz, the commanding general of the United States
Strategic Air forces, to return to Washington. Apart from my hope of
promoting a serious strategic survey, I planned, so I told General Fickel,
to recruit a few civilian experts for an Evaluation Board survey of the
effect of Allied bombing on the French railroads.

That seemed an appropriate study for the Board to undertake. It
was limited in scope, and with a few' w'ell-trained civilian experts we might
help resolve w'hat had been a highly disputed issue. In the early months
of 1944, a fierce argument had taken place between the Eighth Air Force
and the Royal Ait Force (RAF) as to whether our large bombers should
be deployed to assist the pre-invasion bombing effort (beginning D-
minus-60) by destroying the rail system of northern France or be used
in a concentrated attack on German oil production. 1

Back in Washington, I promptly got in touch with my old friend
Fowler Hamilton and other friends in the War Department. I showed
them my chart for a large-scale civilian study and emphasized that the
Evaluation Board was quite incompetent to conduct the kind of compre-
hensive survey that could help us shape our continuing air attack on
Gei many and later on Japan. Much to my surprise, I was pushing against

44 The War Years

an open door; several able men in the Department had independently
come to the same view. Thus, after a few weeks of discussion, we put
together a new proposal for what was ultimately to be called the United
States Strategic Bombing Survey, and I began helping recruit experts to
man it.

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey

When the Survey was finally organized. Secretary Stimson installed
as its nominal leader Franklin D’Olier, the president of the Prudential
Insurance Company. As vice-chairman, he chose Henry (.lay Alexander,
a young Morgan partner who was later to become head of the Morgan
Bank and to oversee the merger that produced the present institution
of the Morgan Guaranty Bank. Although remaining a member of the
Evaluation Board, I was also made a director of the Strategic Bombing
Survey and was able to bring into the organization as co-directors two
old friends of mine: Paul Nitze, with whom I had worked in the Foreign
Economic Administration, and John Kenneth Galbraith, who had been
a colleague during the latter days of the Lend-Lease Administration.

Since I was to have two jobs, I needed a deputy, so I turned to Adlai
Stevenson, who had returned to our old daw firm in Chicago, where I
was sure he was languishing in boredom. I telephoned him on 1 hurs-
day, November 2, asking if be could come to Washington and go with
me fot a tour of duty in Paris. He hesitated for only a moment, then said
that he could, provided he would be home for Christmas because of
Ellen” (his wife). When did he have to be in Washington? I told him to
get there the next day if possible; we would be flying on Saturday. An
hour later, he rang me back: “What the hell will we be doing in Lon-
don?” I explained that I could not answer that question over the tele-
phone but would fill him in completely when we met.

Flying in an Air Force C-54 to London on November 4, the newly
constituted directors of the Strategic Bombing Survey set about turning
a blueprint into an organization. My first task was to negotiate a division
of tasks between the Evaluation Board and the Bombing Survey. With
Henry Alexander’s skillf ul help, we worked out a satisfactory treaty. 1 he
Bombing Survey, on its part, would appraise the whole strategic air
offensive, which included the effect of bombing on every aspect of the
German war effort: munitions production, oil, aircraft, transportation,
public utilities, morale, and civilian defense. The Evaluation Board would
concentrate on appraising the achievements of the tactical air effort in
France that had been conducted by the British and our Ninth Air Force,
in connection with the Normandy invasion.

I knew that the controversy over the most effective means of provid-
ing air support to Operation Overlord (the Allied assault on Normandy)
had acquired a religious intensity. 1 he RAF had wanted to concentrate

The Bombing Survey 45

aii power as early as March 1, 1944, to destroy the railway network in
northern France and the Low Countries. That, it was argued, would
cieate a tailway desert, which would prevent the enemy from moving
reserves into the assault area or from shifting troops and supplies behind
its own lines. Railway marshalling yards, locomotive repair facilities,
bridges, and the like were to be prime targets. The American Air Force!
under General Spaatz, violently disagreed. The best way to assure air
superiority, they argued, was to defeat the German Air Force by attack-
ing its fuel supply, especially the synthetic oil refineries. Those targets,
they contended, were far more important than the French railway sys-
u m. Since the Germans could not risk the destruction of this vital
resource, such attacks would not only cut down the training of German
air crews, but also force the German Air Force into the air so it could be
destroyed in air battles by Allied airmen, who, at that stage of the war,
were being given far more effective training.

I he intellectual underpinning for the American plan had been pro-
vided largely by a group headed by Professor Charles Kindleberger, an
old friend of mine from Washington, while the intellectual champion of
the “railway desert” concept was Solly Zuckerman, then scientific adviser
to Combined Operations of the RAF. 2

After hearing the arguments of both sides, General Eisenhower had
opted for the British “rail plan” rather than the American “oil plan.”
But the American planners still regarded Zuckerman with dark suspi-
cion as a shrewd conniver who exercised a kind of Svengali hold over
An Marshal Tedder. Thus, they looked darkly at the Bombing Analysis
Lnit, which the British had established at about the same time as the
founding of our Evaluation Board and which was largely duplicating the
Board’s work. Its primary purpose— some snide Americans thought—
was to vindicate Zuckerman’s original theory; the theological overtones
of bombing strategy, as I quickly found, turned experts into bigots.

I had had no part in the argument and was interested only in making
as objective an assessment as possible. In the course of our work, I came
to know Solly Zuckerman quite well, and we remain friends to this day.

I made clear at our first talk early in November that I, for one, had no
axe to grind and wanted merely to clear up past misunderstandings. I
unched with him at his house in Oxford, and we met again to compare
notes when we were both working in France. As a result, our two groups
arranged to hold weekly meetings with our French colleagues with all
primary data made freely available both to the British Bombing Analysis
Unit and the American Air Force Evaluation Board.

Working with Adlai

As soon as the Evaluation Board’s jurisdiction had been defined I
flew with Stevenson to Paris to install him as my deputy. He and I were

46 The War Years

assigned a spacious floor in a run-down villa in St. Germain-en-Laye. It
was to be his living quarters, but we would share it during my visits to
France. The villa had just been evacuated by the top command of the
German Veterinary Corps, and signs of hasty retreat were everywhere —
the rooms still strewn with German newspapers and even some official
documents. Stevenson, whose olfactory sensitivities were particularly
acute, complained that the veterinary corps must have used our rooms
to house their horses. Still, the villa would have been quite comfortable
save for the fact that it was a cold November and we had neither central
heating nor fuel for the fireplace. Since an American general on a lower
floor had been amply supplied with both coal and wood from quarter-
master sources, we dined with him the first night and spent the evening
basking in the warmth of his fire. However, at Stevenson s insistence we
left early, and as we struggled back up to our own cold quarters, he
issued a solemn pronunciamento: “No more evenings with that old bas-
tard. I’d rather be frozen to death than bored to death.”

That led us to an alternative solution. Each evening, after returning
from dinner at an officers’ mess, we would put a bottle of gin on the
table, don our overcoats, mix the gin with water purified with halazone
tablets, and drink until, having emptied the bottle, we each felt warm
enough to go to bed. Since there was nothing to do but talk and since we
both faced futures we could not clearly foresee, we rambled on with
unguarded candor of our postwar hopes and intentions. Adlai was
invariably interested in other people, and he probed my own unformu-
lated plans with concern and sympathy. He, himself, was bored with law
practice — he had never regarded our law firm as more than a base of
operations — and he had set his heart on buying the Chicago Daily News
from the estate of Frank Knox. The group he headed had, however,
been outbid, and he was now thinking of running for Senator or Gov-
ernor of Illinois, although, he lamented, “Ellen hated all of that. The
Chicago Democratic boss, Jacob Arvey, had put out vague feelers that
could conceivably lead to something.

Fond and admiring as I was of Adlai, I thought his political ambi-
tions little more than wishful talk. He was, as I saw him, a brilliant,
engaging amateur but far too fastidious to wield an effective pick on the
grim coal face of politics. Besides, his lusty feeling for the comic quality
of life would clearly be an obstacle in political campaigning. How could
he kiss babies without laughing? His pride as well as his sense of the
absurd would inhibit him from playing the political mendicant, while the
mindless hyperbole and oversimplifications of a political campaign would
bore and repel him.

As with everything else he did, Stevenson approached the work of
the Evaluation Board conscientiously and with seriousness of purpose.
Within a relatively few days he had filled legal-size yellow pages with

The Bombing Survey 47

innumerable notes of interviews that contributed substantially to the
findings of the Board. Then, on Thanksgiving Day, November 23, he
arranged a trip to the front as far as Luxembourg, where he discussed
tactical bombing with Professor, now Major, Charles Kindleberger. The
next day, he went on to Metz, saw General Patton, and returned to St.
Germain-en-Laye on the twenty-sixth. I came over from London to find
out how Stevenson was progressing, and one night we had dinner with
a colleague in a rather poor cafe in Montmartre. We had worked until
late, and it was 2:30 a.m. when we started to walk back from Montmartre
to a small hotel just off the Rue de Rivoli where we were staying. As I
later described the incident,

We were walking in .he vicinity of the Place Vendome— appropriately enough,
as Adlai observed, on the rue Casanova— when we encountered American mili-
tary pol.ce raiding an off-limits house. Field- and Company-grade officers were
debouching into the streel in maximum disarray, protesting with spleen and
outraged innocence at the affront to their dignity.

Adlai and I. although civilians, were in uniform (we each had the assimilated
rank of colonel) and hence were indistinguishable from the culprits. This cre-
ated a situation of some hazard, for Adlai was enchanted with the spectacle of so
many chagrined and choleric officers “whose expectations and consummations ”
as he said, had been abruptly interrupted. He insisted on seeing the show, and
at least twice Ins curiosity led him so far into the crowd that he found himself
s loved into a paddy wagon. It took all the advocacy my colleague and I could
muster to establish Stevenson as a noncombatant and save him from the indis-
criminate sanctions of military justice.

It was the kind of absurd situation he thoroughly enjoyed. Thereafter in my
piesence on several occasions he repeated the story with imaginative embellish-
ment generously substituting me for himself as the epic figure rescued from
incarceration.

It gives me no comfort to have the last word . 3

Stevenson returned to the front on December 10 for a few days and
proceeded on to Aachen, where he conferred with General Terry Allen
who was attacking from a forward command post in the basement of a
bank. He met with General Omar Bradley and the other top brass, toured
ladar installations, and watched an experiment in blind bombing by

“ C : c adar re ' ease - Then he wem to Brussels and conferred with
SHAEF officers about the Bombing Survey. Returning home after
Christmas, he immediately tried to get in touch with Ruth and found
her in a hospital. On December 28, 1 received a message that he had sent
through our London embassy: “Ruth very ill, urge you return Washing-
ton soonest. Adlai." A telegram arrived from my father almost simulta-
neously. Ruth, it advised, had had a serious operation.

Arranging a priority passage home, I found her in a hospital slowly
recuperating from painf ul surgery. Although happy to see me, she had

48 The War Years

not wanted me to learn of her troubles. A sturdy Scot, she had concealed
her predicament out of reluctance to worry me and pride in her own
self-reliance. It was a kind of self-denial 1 did not possess and I could
not help but contrast her role with mine. An American civilian in Europe
with even moderate rank and substantial command of his own time could
hardly help but find life absorbing. Though my work required effort
and concentration, I had freedom of movement and was surrounded by
amiable and interesting companions. Not so with Ruth, who was taking
care of our two small sons and maintaining a household with little money
and inadequate help. Her mobility was severely restricted since gasoline
was rationed. Meanwhile, she was painfully ill.

She had told me none of this in her letters, and I would have known
nothing had Stevenson not searched her out in a Washington hospital.
Unimpressed by her plea for silence, he telephoned my parents in
Evanston and cabled me through the embassy. I stayed in Washington
for ten days, as Ruth began a slow recuperation, then returned to Lon-
don. Two and a half months later my father telegraphed me that she
faced a second serious operation— this time for the removal of a kidney.

Returning to Washington the second time, I knew 1 should stay there.
The war would be won without my being on hand to supervise it, and
my duties as a husband and parent clearly outweighed the marginal tasks
that the government had entrusted to me. Yet, with what seems in retro-
spect inexcusable self-indulgence, 1 yielded willingly to the hollow
argument that I could not leave a job half-finished and returned to
England. I do not regard that as my finest hour.

Return to London

Life in London offered the piquancy of the unexpected. The first
V -2 had landed only a week before 1 first arrived in England, and I
soon earned the almost obligatory accolade of a neat miss. Billeted at the
Mount Royal Hotel, across Oxford Street front Marble Arch, I rose early
one Sunday morning with a mild hangover. Ordinarily I would have
omitted breakfast — which 1 have never regarded as an essential meal
but, no doubt moved by contrition for the previous night’s indulgence,
I resolved to abjure my morning bath and walk down past Matble Aich
along Park Lane to the senior officers’ mess in the Grosvenor House.
When I was half dressed, virtue deserted me. To hell with breakfast, I
thought; huge English bath tubs are a delight to anyone over six feet
tall, while powdered eggs are no Lucullan delight.

Ten minutes later, just when I was well covered with soap, the sky
fell in. My bathroom had a casement window I had left ajar; it was blown
wide open with an explosive thud that seriously strained my ear drums.
Seconds later, as the debris that had been blown skyward began to crash,

The Bombing Survey 49

I heard people running compulsively up and down the hall, shouting
and laughing idiotically. My first thought was of an air burst, but when
I opened the bathroom door, the floor, the bed, the entire living room
were covered with shattered glass, while the casement windows hung
limply like Daliesque watches, swinging slowly back and forth.

A V-2 had fallen a hundred yards away within a few feet of the Mar-
ble Arch. Had I not altered course while dressing, I would have formed
part (or parts) of the debris blown wildly into the air — as, indeed, hap-
pened to one poor fellow, various pieces of whose anatomy decorated
surrounding trees and bushes. Thereafter, I religiously took a long bath
every morning. Cleanliness was clearly to be preferred to premature
godliness — or even to breakfast.

On to Bad Nauheim

In April 1945, Kenneth Galbraith and I decided that we could carry
on our work more efficiently by moving our base of operations to Ger-
many. Bad Nauheim was assigned as our headquarters. In a spa called
the Park Hotel, we established offices and billets for the staffs we were
then supervising, while Galbraith and I took over a small private hotel
served by a German domestic staff of seven.

Each director of the Survey, in addition to his collective responsibility
for the management of the whole enterprise, had certain specific super-
visory tasks. My special responsibilities were for two broad areas. The
first was to assess the effectiveness of area bombing, by which was meant
the massive British night raids on cities. Like everything else connected
with bombing, their relative efficacy was a subject of major controversy.

I he United States Air Force, which was dedicated to daytime raids on
precision targets, was highly skeptical of the effectiveness of the bomb-
ing of cities— the only targets large enough for inaccurate night bomb-
ing. The Survey needed to determine exactly what had happened in
cities under attack, how fast urban life was restored, and how serious
was the effect on the war economy when a major city was knocked out.
In addition, I also supervised a detailed study of the effect of bombing
on German transportation — another controversial subject.

Ken Galbraith, whose assignment was to pull together the data
assembled by the specialized sector divisions and to assess the overall
economic effects of the air offensive, had gathered around him a bril-
liant staff of academics temporarily in uniform — economists, statisti-
cians, and historians — as well as civilian experts recruited directly from
America or Great Britain.

Life in Bad Nauheim was stimulating not only because of the intrin-
sic fascination of the data we were gathering and the exotic means by
which we collected it, but also because of the intellectual ferment gen-

yo The War Years

erated by the gifted men we had brought together. One of the inter-
rogators in our psychological effects division was W. H. Auden, the poet,
who dined with us drunk on several occasions. Since we both knew a
large number of people in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), located
only sixty kilometers away in Biebrich, there was a great deal of visiting
back and forth with friends such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Emile
Despres, Charles Hatch, and Sherman Kent.

Paris on V-E Day

Winter wore into spring, and, quite by chance, I was in Paris on V-E
Day, the undeserving beneficiary of undiscriminating good feeling. How
could the midinettes know that, far from being an authentic hero, I was
merely the “Captain of Kopenick” — a brash intruder on other people’s
deserved and private ecstasy? The hour belonged to the Parisians, not
to a civilian in paramilitary uniform who had never felt the brutality of
SS bullies or even heard a shot bred in anger. But, though I tried to
retain intellectual detachment — bemused by the conceit that if I held
aloof from the public exultation, I could resist the prevailing euphoria-
objectivity was quite impossible. Genuine as might be my reservations
about the future, they were irrelevant to the moment and incapable of
surviving in the Paris streets on that day of victory.

From the balcony of an office building on the Champs Elysees, we
looked down on fighter planes that curved over the obelisk in the Place
de la Concorde, streaked just above the heads of the masses churning in
the street, then jerked abruptly upward to clear the Arc de Triomphe.
No one raised a cautionary eyebrow; madness was endemic to the
moment. At the liberation of Paris, eight months previously, an Ameri-
can general is said to have announced, “Any GI who sleeps alone tonight
is a goddamned exhibitionist.” That mot was quite as appropriate for
V-E night.

Accompanied by one of the Survey’s young German-Jewish scholars
in uniform, I set out to find his elderly mother, who had hidden for four
years in the working-class suburb of Billancourt. Installing her in one of
the Survey’s jeeps, we drove through uproarious crowds to the top of
Montmartre so she could, like Saint Genevieve, look down on Paris. With
gleeful youths perched in layers all over my jeep, I made a slow descent,
steering by remote control.

Last Days of the Third Reich

The next day was business as usual — or, more than usual. With the
Third Reich now a kitchen midden, the people and records we needed
had become available, so I rushed back to our London headquarters to

The Bombing Survey 57

catch up on the news. I here I learned that the Nazis, in a final convul-
sive effort to keep control, had split into two parts like an amoeba. A
small group of staff officers had gone south to Berchtesgaden; a more
important group had found their way to the north. On May 2, 1945,
Admiral Doenitz had announced over the Hamburg radio that Hitler
was dead and that he was Hitler s heir. Then, as the north German ports
fell successively to Field Marshal Montgomery, the group had rendez-
voused at Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein, just five kilometers south of
the Danish border. On May 7, the Flensburg radio had carried Doenitz’s
message of defeat and announced the formation of what he hoped the
Allies would recognize as an established government. With a black-
mailer’s insolence, he insisted that only that “government” could prevent
chaos during the period of surrender.

1 he Bombing Survey had no professional interest in most of the
Flensburg group: Admiral Doenitz; Colonel General Jodi; Count von
Krosigk, the German finance minister; Backer, the minister of agricul-
ture; Seldte, the doddering and neglected minister of labor; and old
Dorpmueller, head of the Reichsbahn. Those were fodder for specialists
with a different mission. What excited us was a report from Major Sid-
ney Spivak, our liaison officer with the Twenty-First Army- Group, that
one of our wandering intelligence teams had found Albert Speer.

Speer was the man we most wished to see. As the czar of German
war production ever since the spring of 1942, he, above all others, could,
if willing, confirm many of our speculations. But though he was the Sur-
vey s number one target, we knew little about him — not much more than
what appeared in German publications at a time when censorship was
rigorous. I alerted Ken Galbraith and Paul Nitze, who were in the field,
and they promptly joined me. Loading a plane with interpreters, we
took off across the flooded fields of northern Holland, where the dikes
had been bombed or sabotaged, which we still instinctively thought of as
enemy territory.

Flensburg airport was crowded with Luftwaffe planes in various stages
of disrepair and with Luftwaffe officers still quite intact. Soldiers with
swastikas on their caps were pursuing a busy routine as though Germany
had never surrended, while the small cadre of British officers command-
ing the handful of Allied troops at the field seemed uncertain whether
they were conquerors or guests. They were trying hard to avoid diplo-
matic gaffes but had only the vaguest of instructions.

fo our disgust, no ground transport was visible. We stood about
awkwardly, blinking in the cold morning air. An RAF squadron leader
approached with two men in gray uniforms and we shook hands all
around; only when the two men responded in German gutterals did we
note the insignia on their caps. Though we felt foolish, the squadron
leader seemed not to notice; in the three days he had been running the

52 The War Years

field, the bizarre had become commonplace. Still, he offered little
encouragement.

“ There are a couple of German divisions between you and those top
Nazi bastards. I don’t know what’s going on in town; that’s not my prob-
lem. But I’m bloody sure it makes no sense!”

He cranked the field telephone vigorously to put us through to the
SHAEF Control Party, but communications worked no better than usual.
We were still standing about, cursing Major Spivak, when a caravan
wound slowly toward our plane. It consisted of four conscripted cars
with German drivers led by a curious kind of gypsy wagon, which I rec-
ognized as the major’s jeep, long a legend in the area. In his movements
throughout the Twenty-First Army Group, the major carried a fantastic
inventory of merchandise that he turned over with a velocity to put Macy’s
and Gimbels in awe. Those trade goods, constantly replenished, were
contained in four captured ammunition cases welded on the sides and
back of the jeep. It was the least military-looking vehicle in the theater.

The major was both disarming and reassuring. He had arranged
lunch and billets for us on the Patria, an old Hamburg-America liner
anchored in the Flensburg Fjord, where the SHAEF Control Party was
stationed. Yes, of course, Speer was available. One of our sergeants had
been talking with him for two days.

The Patria s billeting officer was a harried but heroic young captain
with protocol problems that would have overwhelmed any foreign office.
He could have taken in stride th e protocolair e complexities of providing
cabin space for American army and navy officers of various ranks, but
there were also British officers, American civilians, and German naval
personnel. A Russian mission was expected in a day or two, and Robert
Murphy, who held ambassadorial rank, was coming with a party of dip-
lomats. Added to all this was the vestigial caste system of the liner’s tour-
ist days. Since he would not have enough first-class cabins, could one
give second-class accommodations to first-class generals?

Frenetically reviewing his resources, the captain assigned us cabins
adequate for sleeping, if not for working. A few minutes later, I looked
through binoculars (liberated an hour before from a Nazi vice-admiral)
at the technicolor blue of the Flensburg Fjord and at its crowded shore-
line. First was the Submarine School, then — a mile up the shore through
a confusion of Nazi transports, minesweepers, and E- Boats — I saw the
Marine and Signal School, which served as the headquarters of the so-
called German general staff.

Packed in the Flensburg enclave were several thousand enlisted men
with several hundred field-grade officers. Impenitently arrogant, the
officers added a carnival air to the promenade along the waterfront;
they included infantry colonels and majors from panzer divisions, pilots
and navigators from the Luftwaffe, and submarine commanders who

Albert Speer on a Grade-B Movie Set 53

looked like commercial travelers costumed for a lodge convention. With
their immaculate uniforms and well-burnished medals, they reminded
me of a crowd of Hollywood extras loafing during lunch hour. I expected
to hear a whistle any moment and to see them all stampede back to the
set.

Even after a week in Flensburg, I could not walk past a Luger-bear-
ing Erich von Stroheim without a sense of unreality. Never before had I
seen a representative of the Wehrmacht, except in a prisoner of war
camp or on a movie screen. Now I was on the receiving end of correct
and emphatic salutes from several thousand still fully armed Nazis.

y Albert Speer on a Grade-B Movie Set

After lunch, we set out for Glticksburg, where Speer was living
in a schloss belonging to the Duke of Holstein. The road took us past
the offices of the Oberkommando Wehrmacht (the German general staff)
and through two barricades that the make-believe Flensburg govern-
ment had erected, more to assert its dignity than to safeguard its person-
nel or documents. Those barricades were like railroad-crossing gates;
stationed beside each were two SS guards with Sten guns. Approaching
cars were required to stop for recognition.

Our vehicle was an oversized Mercedes-Benz, on which no one had
yet bothered to paint American Army identification; it was driven by a
young Jewish lieutenant who would interpret for us during interroga-
tions. Having fled Germany eight years before and been dropped as a
paratrooper in Normandy on D-Day-minus-one, he cherished a well-
deserved hatred for Nazis. Without advance notice, he introduced me
to a game he had invented: he would bear down on the barricades at
fifty miles an hour, put his head out of the front window, and shout in
angry German, “Out of the way, you swine.” The SS guards would raise
their Sten guns and advance toward the middle of the road, while 1
speculated in a detached way whether we would crash into the gates
before the bullets crashed into us. But, with the implausible timing of a
Pearl White movie serial, the guards would recognize our American uni-
foi ms just in time to leap to the side and jerk up the gates as our car
scraped under. In the days that followed, I came to suspect that our
lieutenant rehearsed the routine with them while off duty.

I he castle of the Duke of Holstein, known as Schloss Gliicksburg, is
a picturesque sixteenth-century chateau, complete with tower, turrets, a
moat, and, at that time, a complement of SS guards. Wearing a dark
brown uniform, Speer met us in the Great Hall, friendly and self-con-

54 The War Years

sciously affable. Only forty years old, he looked, Galbraith remarked,
like a young college professor and “like any professor, he enjoyed an
audience.”

“I’m glad you’ve come,” he said. “I was afraid I’d been forgotten.”
Later, he asked us if we could arrange to have him arrested; he was, he
said, embarrassed to be part of the opera bouffe government on the Flens-
burg Wilhelmstrasse.

Speer in Close Up

During an afternoon’s talk, we organized a pattern for the following
week. Each morning, Speer, as minister of economics and production in
the Flensburg government, would attend the ten o’clock cabinet meeting
on the Wilhelmstrasse. At two in the afternoon, we would arrive for what
he referred to as our “bombing high school” — five hours of interroga-
tion, while Speer’s frightened but competent stenographers took a ver-
batim transcript of the testimony. In the evenings, Speer would do his
homework, preparing monographs on subjects in which we expressed
interest, digging out facts and dates from his files, making lists of the
evacuation repositories, and giving us addresses and letters of introduc-
tion to his key assistants.

In the six days that followed, we discovered that Speer had a story
he was anxious to tell. He gave us detailed information for which our
held teams had been searching and which our analysts had been pain-
fully trying to piece together out of bits and pieces of fact, gossip, and
rumor. It was like stumbling on the page of answers after one had worked
on a puzzle for months.

After one session, Speer motioned us toward a corner, saying he had
something important to give us. From under a table, he produced ten
or twelve volumes of photocover — pictures, he said, of every hydro-elec-
tric installation in the western part of the Soviet Union. Speer had had
the pictures taken to be used in an air attack by pick-a-back planes, but
Herman Goering had stopped the project out of bureaucratic jealousy.
“I give you this,” Speer said, “because, sooner or later, you’re going to
have to fight the Communists. It’s too bad we Germans couldn’t have
made common cause with you. The Russians are the enemy of us both.”
It was a theme to which he repeatedly recurred — though not at Nurem-
berg, where Soviet judges were sitting on the bench.

When we arrived back at the P atria with the photocover in our car,
the British billeting officer seemed upset. He had to give cabins on our
deck to a high-ranking Soviet military and naval mission that had just
arrived. Though Galbraith, Paul Nitze, and I could stay where we were,
our staff had been shifted to the lower reaches of the ship surrounded

Albert Speer on a Grade-B Movie Set 55

by Russians. We put a round-the-clock guard on the photocover until
we could ship it back to London the next day.

As the week drew to a close, the Flensburg farce was clearly nearing
the end of its run. The exclusion of the press meant not only that the
outside world was insulated f rom Flensburg but also that Flensburg was
insulated from the outside world. We knew the critics had been writing
consistently bad notices of the ham performance in the local Wilhelm-
strasse but, thought we were sure the engagement was limited, we were
not clear when the sheriff might arrive with an attachment for the sce-
nery and a summons for the cast.

I hat afternoon, I told Robert Murphy, Eisenhower’s political adviser
and an old friend of mine from Washington, about our interviews and
asked him if he had any specific questions for Speer. “Yes, we’d like to
know what happened to Hitler’s political will. You’d better find out
tonight, since we re pulling in the whole gang tomorrow morning.” So
we sent a car to bring Speer to a house we had requisitioned on the outer
fringes of Flensburg. Galbraith, Nitze, and I were waiting when he arrived
at about ten o’clock, and we had with us two majors and a lieutenant
from the Survey staff. After six days of interrogation and intensive
homework, Speer seemed under strain but was still voluble. In violation
of the fraternization regulations, we put a bottle of whisky on the dining-
room table; at four-thirty the next morning Speer was groggy but still
talking.

Through a Lens Darkly

During our regular interrogations, we had confined ourselves to the
Survey’s specific frame of reference — the ef fect of our air offensive on
the German economy. Now Speer was encouraged to talk in a much
broader context. What had happened just prior to the collapse? What
had produced the collapse.-" How did he characterize the gang Adolf
Hitler had gathered about him? How did he, himself, appraise Hitler?

Rather than being put off by this line of questioning, Speer seemed
grateful for the opportunity to unburden himself without the con-
straints of our more technical discussions. Though I took detailed notes
of the story that he told, I will not repeat them here, for the story has
been completely set down in Speer’s own memoirs, as well as in a dozen
interviews he gave after his release from prison.

At the time, however, it was all fresh. We were the first on the Allied
side to hear the story that he told with at least the illusion of detach-
ment — as though he were talking about other people in another country.
His primary emphasis was on the corruption and degraded character of
his Nazi colleagues. Goering was a contemptible morphine addict with
unlimited greed. Goebbels, who posed as an intellectual, was a sycophan-

56 The War Years

tic schemer. Himmler was a fool who dreamed bizarre fantasies about
the future glory of the party, while dabbling in astrology and Oriental
nonsense. Bormann was a brutal extortionist who kept on Hitlers good
side by bribery.

Cunning as he was, Hitler had brought the 1 bird Reich down by his
own blunders. He need not have started the war. He had proved he
could get power and territory without it. Arrogance had led him to attack
Russia, since, after the defeat of France, he thought everything else would
be easy. His most stupid mistake was to declare war on the United States.
It was a thoughtless act taken in appalling ignorance, since neither he
nor his entourage knew anything about America. Nor would he believe
any of the statistics he was given.

Toward the end, Hitler retired to the bunker under the Reichschan-
cellery in Berlin. There he lived isolated from the real world and sur-
rounded by toadies who told him only what he wanted to hear. Particu-
larly after the Gestapo massacred or silenced the junior officers involved
in the July 20 attempt on Hitler’s life, decisions were made in a vac-
uum. War maps showed divisions that were only skeletal forces, while
Hitler compulsively ordered the deployment of troop units that no longer
existed.

The constant game was a search for scapegoats, with everyone blam-
ing everyone else. In the end, the grotesque gang in the bunker united
in spewing their venom at the German people, calling for a scorched-
earth policy, the climactic orgasm of a G otter dammerung. Speer had per-
sonally frustrated that policy, first by argument and, when that failed,
by sabotage at the risk of his life.

Though in harsh disfavor, Speer returned to the bunker for Hitler’s
birthday on April 20 to witness the rats leaving the sinking ship. Goering
announced he was going south to organize defenses. Others made excuses
to leave Berlin on official business when they had not had any official
business outside Berlin in years. The decision was then made to split the
ministries into two parts: one government to go north, and the other
south. Speer left the next day to set up the northern branch of his min-
istry. But in Hamburg he recorded a radio speech announcing that the
war was lost and urging all Germans to cooperate with the conquerors
to preserve the means of survival. That speech was to be played imme-
diately after Hitler’s death.

On April 23, Speer returned to Berlin to see Hitler one last time and
to say goodbye. It was an unnecessary and foolhardy trip, dictated only
by sentiment. The bunker was almost empty. Only a few had remained
loyal — Bormann, Goebbels with his wife and six children, and Eva Braun,
together with some army officers. He stayed until four o’clock in the
morning of April 24 to have a second talk with Hitler. He found him
cold and empty, though curiously composed because he knew his life
was over. He seemed primarily obsessed by thoughts of what would hap-

Albert Speer on a Grade-B Movie Set 57

pen to his corpse; he had been horrified by the desecration of Musso-
lini’s body. Then, following the long night, on the morning of Tuesday,
April 24, Speer returned to Hamburg.

I hat was the essence of Speer’s long soliloquy. I listened with fasci-
nation but almost guiltily, as though I had accidentally tuned in on a
sordid and intimate drama I was not meant to hear. It was shot through
with a macabre element we found hard to associate with this cultivated,
intelligent man who despised his Nazi colleagues as a loathsome breed.
He had shown the greatest emotion when, during the course of his long
exposition, one of us had asked the important question: “What do you
know about the treatment of Jews in the extermination camps?”

He had grimaced with distaste. “I know frightful things have been
happening, he said, but that’s all I know. A friend of mine from party
circles came to see me some time ago and said in great anguish: ‘Never
accept an invitation to visit a particular concentration camp in Upper
Silesia. What is going on there, you would never believe.’ I never went,
noi did I ever try to find out what he meant. But I was sick at heart. My
sense of guilt has stayed with me; I ve thought about that conversation
many times. I deliberately avoided discovering things that would have
compelled me to take action. I’ve consoled myself with the thought that,
once the war was over — once there were no more shooting and strain —

we could get rid of the brutality and turn our talents to constructive
tasks.”

When Speer stopped talking, it was as though the reel had run out,
and for a moment we sat silent. The entire scene was outlandish — much
too bizarre even for a bad movie.

Here we were Galbraith, Nitze, and I — sitting in an ugly bourgeois
German house in the middle of the night surrounded by several thou-
sand armed Nazi troops, who would have killed us automatically two
weeks before. We were listening to a top Nazi conjure up Hitler — dead
just twenty-two days as a living, ominous presence, talking in a conver-
sational tone of weird events in that house of madmen, the underground
bunker.

I thought of Marlow, the narrator in Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim ,
who had spun his tale through chapter after chapter; it would have taken
him, someone had once pointed out, twenty-six hours to recount the
whole story. Now it was not Marlow but Lord Jim himself talking — the
flawed man who had made a fatal error of judgment and would have to
live with it or die for it. I did not know which. And the tale he was telling
was not Lord Jim but 7 he Heart oj Darkness — the Gothic saga of a madman
obsessed by power.

My musing stopped abruptly. What about the commission Ambassa-
dor Murphy had given me? What had happened to Hitler’s will? It had,
Speer said, been entrusted to Major Willi Johannmeier on April 28 or
29, after Berlin was surrounded — or all but surrounded — by the Rus-

5<? The War Years

sians. Johannmeier was to board a reconnaissance plane on a golf course
near Wannsee. 1 Bormann sent a radiogram on April 30 informing
Doenitz that he headed the succession under the will. Another radi-
ogram from Bormann to Doenitz on May 1 said the will was in effect.

An item of minor interest missing from my notes was recorded by
Mr. James P. O’Donnell in an article in the New York Times Magazine of
October 26, 1969.

In May 1945 • • . such knowledgeable Americans as George Ball and John
Kenneth Galbraith bird-dogged their way through the ruins to Albert Speer.
They found him in Schleswig-Holstein, with Admiral Doenitz’ rump govern-
ment. For hundreds of hours Speer was bombarded with questions. Finally, Ball
. . . asked: “By the way, what was Eva Braun really like?”

Speer’s discreet answer, then as now, “For future historians, Eva is bound to
be a shattering disappointment. When people hrst met the Fuehrer’s mistress —
and not many ever met her — she struck them as nippy and lofty-nosed. That
was, however, a f ront for her shyness and unhappiness. She was no great beauty,
rather pert, with very attractive legs — the romantic Bavarian shopgirl type. She
had limpid, porcelain blue eyes and wore cheap costume jewelry from Gablonz
that her lover gave her every Christmas. She loved to kick up her heels on the
dance floor, to ski, to smoke and drink. Hitler loathed these four pursuits but
tolerated them. She had no interest in politics.”

It had been a long night. Knowing Speer was to be picked up by
military police at eight o’clock, we sent him back to his castle and retui ned
to the Patria. When arrested in his pajamas, Speer looked, according to
the New York Times ' s correspondent, “unhappy and tired.’

We awoke in a greatly constricted world. Everyone would be con-
fined to billets for the next hour. During the night, units of the British
Second Army had moved into town, and a regiment of Churchill tanks
and two infantry battalions from the 1 59th Brigade of the 1 ith Armored
Division were rounding up the Wehrmacht. Indignant and bewildered
groups were being herded together in vacant lots or marched in reluc-
tant columns toward POW camps.

I could find no trace of Major Spivak. He had, he told me later, been
supervising the capitulation. I he public rooms of [he Patria were small;
its designers had obviously not had in mind the surrender of the Wehr-
macht. But, as Galbraith pointed out, if a railroad coach in Compiegne
could be the scene of two great surrenders, the first-class bar of the P atria
was an adequate setting for the final act of the Flensburg farce.

The Regurgitation of the Master Race

During our days in Flensburg, we had spent our afternoons inter-
viewing Speer and the mornings and late evenings preparing material
for the next day’s interrogations. Three or four times after returning

Albert Speer on a Grade-B Movie Set 59

from Schloss Gliicksburg, we drove across the Danish border, which lay
only a few kilometers to the north. To anyone who had been for a year
in other parts of Europe, Denmark that spring was the flared end of the
cornucopia — the hypothetical never-never-land of the classical econo-
mists, the perfect illustration of the interplay of supply and demand. In
the cafes, one could order not one, but two, steak dinners with the Dan-
ish equivalent of smorgasbord. One could consume unlimited quantities
of butter and cream and cheese. In the hardware stores, one could find
pots and pans; in the bookshops, books. But nowhere could one buy tea
or Scotch whisky or cigarettes.

Major Spivak had not been in Denmark since before the war, but he
had an unerring instinct for scarcity. Somewhere in his recent travels he
had obtained fifty pounds of tea, wrapped in one-pound packages and
stowed away in one of his bottomless ammunition cases, which could also
yield half a dozen bottles of Scotch and at least a dozen cartons of Ches-
terfields. The Chesterfields had never seen a PX; through some dubious
channel, they had come directly from the United States and were tax-
paid, so they were available for use as wampum without violating army
regulations.

Our nightly excursions to Denmark were an amiable diversion. The
Danes were demonstratively friendly; they had seen few American uni-
forms, and they behaved toward us as the French had done in the first
weeks after the liberation. Americans felt imprisoned in Germany by the
restrictions on responding to friendliness; in Denmark, there were no
non-fraternization rules.

Traveling north across the border gave me a feeling of going the
wrong way on a one-way street, as we constantly pushed through Hocks
of homing Nazis. Norway and Denmark were regurgitating the master
race. The Wehrmacht was on the move again, but this time toward Ger-
many; the occupation armies had brought their women and children
with them, and now they were taking them home. Some were tired, ill,
underfed, and in rags, but this was not like the migration down the roads
of France five years before; the Stukas were not overhead, and there was
no strafing.

Hitler’s legions resembled an eighteenth-century army as they strag-
gled under untidy packs, pulled nondescript carts, or pushed baby car-
riages, squeaking and swaying under bed rolls. A few soldiers had
managed to salvage bicycles and a rare horse was seen, always bearing a
Luftwaffe officer — probably, so Galbraith observed, the only occasion in
history when airmen were glad to impersonate cavalry. The general effect
was a viscous and slowly moving outpouring of humanity containing an
occasional small unit that had preserved its discipline, marching in a
well-formed column with a stern martinet in command. The individual
men in these disciplined columns looked strikingly different from their

6 o The War Years

dispirited comrades; they had retained a kind of desperate dignity. But
most of the amorphous stream reminded me of pictures I remembered
having brooded over as a boy, dramatic paintings of the retreat from
Moscow or the Confederate Army after Appomattox, and it occurred to
me that armies in defeat are indistinguishable.

Our Danish excursions were merely a fleeting break in the serious
business of the Survey, and, as soon as Speer had been arrested, we flew
back to London to begin sorting out the vast amount of material he had
provided. Among other things, he had given us details as to where key
members of his staff had taken cover in Germany and where important
documents were cached. It was thus relatively easy for us to send out
teams to pick up individuals with their papers and return them to our
working quarters in the spa hotel at Bad Nauheim, one wing of which
we transformed into a kind of genteel concentration camp.

I did not, however, stay in Europe long, since at the end of May I
was ordered to return to Washington with Henry Alexander, Paul Nitze,
and General Orville Anderson. Two of our other directors, J. Fred Searls,
Jr., who was in charge of munitions studies, and Robert P. Russell, who
was surveying the oil bombing, had already returned. We arrived in
Washington on June 8 and on June 9 met with the Joint Target Group,
which was planning the air assault on the Japanese home islands. What
lessons had we derived from the Survey so far? And, particularly, what
had we learned from Albert Speer? On June 1 1, we were interrogated
at length by some fifty officers representing all the services, and on June
12, 14, and 15 we held further meetings with the Joint Target Group.

I am not sure that the information we supplied was of great assis-
tance, since the Japanese economy dif f ered drastically from that of Ger-
many and the crucial targets were of a different order. Nor were the
questions well formulated. After one long session dominated by General
Curtis LeMay, who did most of the talking, I came away dismayed at
the shallowness of the views expressed. Just as I was leaving the room,
General Lauris Norstad put his hand on my shoulder and said quietly,
“George, never forget that individually many of those men are highly
intelligent, but when they meet collectively — did you ever hear such god-
damn nonsense?”

1 shall not undertake to recount other experiences during my stay in
Bad Nauheim, since John Kenneth Galbraith has already told those sto-
ries with panache in his memoirs, A Life in Our Time. We did, as he
recounts, deny Nicholas Kaldor a chance to influence the British elec-
tions, and we did go to Berlin and get marginally involved in the Pots-
dam Conference.

Nor shall I describe the appearance of the Red Army in Berlin, since
so many others have already written vividly of that period. Apart from
the extravagant traffic in Mickey Mouse watches and the extraordinary

Albert Speer on a Grade -B Movie Set 61

market demand for any item of underclothing the OSS secretaries were
willing to sell, the army impressed me primarily by the primitive quality
of its transport. Horse-drawn vehicles were everywhere and, having
watched American GIs headed for the front crouched down in jeeps
with their feet dangling over the hood (“the only soldiers in history ever
to go into battle with their feet higher than their heads,” to quote Gal-
braith), I was astonished that the Red Army had beaten the Germans so
badly.

At Bad Nauheim on August 6, we first heard news of the bomb on
Hiroshima. I was perhaps the only one not surprised. At lunch in Lon-
don in December 1944, a British scientist had assured me, “the atomic
bomb is on its way,” and, when I had returned to Washington the follow-
i n &J une ’ m y co-director, J. Fred Searls, who worked closely with Jimmy
Byrnes, had told me in some detail of the bomb and of the need to use
it on Japan. Our military had calculated that to win the war against the
Japanese without using the bomb would, he said, entail an estimated
three hundred thousand American casualties. That, at least, was the pro-
jection at the time, and whether or not it was correct, it was the basis on
which the Hiroshima decision was made. In spite of all the “visions and
revisions” since then, I have never doubted that, had I been President
Truman, I would have decided as he did.

Second-guessing, of course, is easy, and had we then known what we
later learned of the approaching collapse of the Japanese economy some
less brutal nuclear demonstration might have been called for. But Tru-
man acted on the information then available and with one bomb changed
the world.

With the war now drawing to a close, it was time for the Survey to
move its headcjuarters to Washington, sort out the findings, and put
reports in shape — not an easy task, since there were wide differences of
view as to the interpretation of the data. Nevertheless, we went at it with
vigor — sometimes in my Washington home — and finally arrived at a
compromise. I he report of Ken Galbraith’s group (the Overall Studies
Division) would be published separately, while the Survey would publish
an overall assessment of its own. In the end, our findings settled noth-
ing; the central arguments are likely to continue for years. How large a
factor was our strategic air offensive in shaping the outcome of the war?
Could our resources of men and material have been better employed in
other ways?

On this score, Speer had provided some curious but fascinating
insights. At the time of the massive Hamburg raids in 1943, when the
British bombers had first produced a fire storm, the news had made an
enormous impact on Hitler and his colleagues. Had the Allies continued
those attacks, knocking Hamburg completely out of the war, German
morale, he felt, would have suffered a critical blow. But because bomber

62 The War Years

losses had been heavy and, once forewarned, the Germans had concen-
trated antiaircraft fire to protect the city, the Allies had moved on to
other targets. Again, Speer pointed out that some of our bombing had
made little critical difference; by wiping out many small businesses, we
had often freed labor for more productive use; by bombing air-frame
production at a time when aircraft engines were in short supply, we had
gotten their aircraft production back into phase. I he most startling sta-
tistic he put forward was that, by June 1944, German war production
had expanded to roughly three times what it had been at the outset of
the war. However, when our Eighth Air Force started bombing oil pro-
duction in June, we dealt a critical blow, for, even though the Germans
faced no immediate shortage, the prospect of continued reduction in oil
supplies resulted in curtailing training to the point where German pilots
were pushed into combat with totally inadequate training.

Later, the saturation bombing in the Ruhr that began in September
1944 had brought German industry largely to a halt, not so much because
we had smashed up machinery — the Germans always had a large surplus
of general-purpose machine tools — but because the bombing destroyed
internal transport in plant complexes.

Finally, some of us felt that the greatest contribution of our strategic
bombing was to force the German Air Force into the air, where our
fighters could destroy it. Only by the attrition of the GAF did the Allies
gain clear command of the air over the Normandy battlefield — which
was essential to victory

Speer Revisited

In the months after his arrest, Galbraith and I saw Speer again at
Dustbin, which was the British detention camp at Kransberg castle, near
Bad Nauheim. After studying our findings, we found there were still
unresolved questions that only he could answer. Speer received us in the
garden with the British guards keeping a discreet distance. Though put-
ting a sardonic face on his predicament, he was obviously worried since
he had heard rumors of possible war-crimes trials. Half-amused, he said,
“Will you be my lawyer, Mr. Ball?” When I told him that was impossible,
he replied, “Well, you’re making a mistake; many young lawyers have
made their reputations by representing notorious personalities, and you’ll
never get a better chance.”

During the 1960s, while Under Secretary of State, I paid occasional
visits to Bonn. On two occasions, Speer’s daughter, Hilde, came from
Berlin to see me. Would I try to get Speer’s sentence reduced? To main-
tain Spandau prison required the labor of 125 to 150 people, and it
seemed absurd to keep Speer locked up when Nazis guilty of greater
crimes had been freed. But though the American, British, and French

Albert Speer on a Grade -B Movie Set 63

governments were agreeable to his early release, the Soviets continued
intractable.

In Flensburg, Speer had seemed a resourceful man, not very differ-
ent from other clever, resourceful men I knew; with charm and appar-
ently spontaneous candor, he evoked in us a sympathy of which we were
all secretly ashamed. What had he then known of the Holocaust? But
what had my colleagues and I then known about it?

Of course, I had heard dark stories of the treatment of Slavs, Jews,
Gypsies, and others who did not meet the Wagnerian standards of the
master race. But I believe — though I am uncertain at this point — that I
had tended to think those rumors exaggerated. The full horrors of
Auschwitz and Buchenwald made a deep impression only after the docu-
mented revelations of Nuremburg. It was only then that I became fully
and sickenly aware of the atrocious persecution of Jews and Slavs, who
were the victims of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

That must seem curious today, and even self-serving. Yet I believe it
is true, nor do I think I was less well informed than most other Ameri-
cans, including those, like myself, who had served in the government. 2
Perhaps we were so preoccupied with the squalid menace of the war we
did not focus on this unspeakable ghastliness. It may also be that the
idea of mass extermination was so far outside the traditional compre-
hension of most Americans that we instinctively refused to believe in its
existence.

At Nuremberg, in contrast to the other top Nazis, Speer forthrightly
accepted responsibility for Hitler’s outrages and got his comeuppance in
a twenty-year sentence. Meanwhile, I had come to think of him, if at all,
only as the central figure in a brief encounter that had occurred long
ago. Thus, when, in 1970, a representative of the British Broadcasting
Corporation called to ask if I would interview Speer in Munich for a
television program, I reacted with mixed feelings. After all, had he not
been part of the most inhuman gang since Tamerlane’s? Still, I could
not resist the chance to see what changes two decades of captivity would
have wrought in him and to plumb yet further the Speer enigma.

In Munich, there were to be two inquisitors besides myself : Professor
Hugh Trevor-Roper, a distinguished British historian, and the very astute
and able Michael Charlton of the BBC. Speer had, we were told, learned
English, as well as French, during his incarceration, so we would not
have to bother with interpreters. Speer greeted us suavely, appearing in
remarkably good shape for a man who had spent two decades in prison.
He seemed more relaxed than I, who found the interrogation awkward
and difficult. I saw Speer with split vision: on the one hand, he was a
man of obvious charm, to which it was hard not to respond; on the other
hand, he had been part of Hitler’s noxious entourage.

Although I was anxious to avoid repeating the obvious, there seemed

64 The War Years

few questions that had not been answered in Speer’s memoirs and in the
spate of books and articles about him. All Trevor-Roper and I could do
was to fill in details, while picking away naggingly at the central mystery:
how could such an intelligent man willingly serve in a vile government
under a demented leader?

Speer tried to answer that question for me — and I cannot recall
whether it was on, or off, camera — with a figure of speech borrowed
from Malraux, striking, yet still far from satisfying . 3 “If,” he said, “one
spends long enough in the dim light of an aquarium, everything acquires
a kind of normality. But if one ever moves outside into the pure light of
day and looks into the aquarium, he finds it incredible he could ever
have put up with it.”

To us, Speer’s most baffling reaction was the brooding fascination
that, as he frankly admitted, Hitler still held for him even after almost
four decades. Though Nuremberg had shown beyond question that
Hitler had committed acts of unparalleled depravity, Speer could still
not totally free himself of the spell.

Could it be merely the residual awe of a young man — only twenty-
eight when he first met Hitler and only forty when Hitler died — a young
man dazzled by his unexpected access to the very embodiment of power?
Speer had seen Hitler regularly late at night at “artistic” tea parties after
the Fiihrer had first conferred with his generals. As the war continued,
those tea parties were held later and later — at two or three or four o’clock
in the morning. On such occasions, Hitler relaxed and, even though the
war was going badly, continued to discuss his building plans with Speer.
For Hitler, architecture was, Speer said, “not an avocation but an obses-
sion.” Since Speer was the professional and Hitler the architect manque,
the young man held an intangible advantage that partially offset the
disparity in their positions. Hitler promised Speer the chance to build
the world’s largest buildings — an opportunity for which Speer suc-
cumbed in the banal Faustian parallel. But, if he had sold his soul to the
devil and had paid for it by revulsion and long imprisonment, he still
could not deny his residual bemusement.

That evening I had dinner with Speer and his wife in the restaurant
of the leading Munich hotel. I found Frau Speer a formidable, and no
doubt an admirable, woman; through the long years of Speer’s impris-
onment, she had somehow brought up their family of six children with
conspicuous success. Now one son was a successful architect; his daugh-
ter had married well; and so on. We talked mainly about how the family
had maintained itself and how they reacted to the shame associated with
his name.

During dinner, a German friend entered the room and started in my
direction. Halfway across the floor, he recognized Speer and abruptly
veered off, waving at me and taking a seat at a side table. After dinner,

Albert Speer on a Grade -B Movie Set 65

I stopped at my friend’s table to apologize for causing him embarrass-
ment. He had, he said, understood my predicament and the incident
had not upset him. My friend was Helmut Schmidt, the current Chan-
cellor of West Germany.

The next morning, the BBC flew Speer and me to Hamburg; from
there we drove to Flensburg, past the Naval Training School where the
Patria had been anchored, and on to Gliicksburg and the Duke of Hol-
stein’s castle. On the plane, Speer spoke of his experiences after prison.
When he first left Spandau for his home at Heidelberg, he had felt like
Rip Van Winkle debouched into a drastically altered world. The traffic
had upset him, while the mere exposure to the open air had made him
physically ill. Now he had developed an adequate pattern of living. He
liked the new world he had found. He spoke with enthusiasm of his new
car with its rotary engine; his memoirs were enjoying unexpected suc-
cess; and he was preparing his diaries for publication. He was also work-
ing on a theoretical discussion of how an industrial society adapts to war.
Whereas Admiral Doenitz, released after serving only ten years, had
spoken of having to “feel my way back into the world,” Speer had made
that difficult passage with relative ease.

I asked about his work as Hitler’s architect. He had been commis-
sioned to design the new Berlin to Hitler’s gargantuan specifications.
I he three-mile-long Prachtstrasse (Street of Splendor) was to run on a
north-south axis through the heart of the city, which was to be renamed
Germania. To the south would be a railroad station three times as large
as Grand Central Station in New York City (into which trains would
presumably run on time). The avenue itself — almost twice as wide as the
Champs Elysees — would pass in front of the Fiihrer Palast, seventy times
as large as Bismarck’s chancellory. There would be a Reichstag four times
the size of the old Reichstag, a general staff headquarters, embassies,
and so on. 1 he northern end would be dominated by a secular cathedral
modeled vaguely on the Pantheon in Rome but with a copper dome
large enough to encompass the dome of St. Peter’s seven times over,
surmounted by an imperial German eagle nearly fifty feet tall. Hitler’s
megalomania found its ultimate expression in architecture. A twentieth-
century pharaoh, he liked to speculate on how the ruins of his buildings
would look in a thousand years.

Did Speer regret never having built Hitler’s monstrosities? “God, no,”
he replied with a shudder. “Weren’t they frightful?”

Deja vu overwhelmed me in Schloss Gliicksburg as we sat in the same
gilt chairs before the same table where we had conducted our interviews
twenty-six years before. Though I had no fresh ideas, some pretense of
ritual interrogation was expected for the television public. My questions
were, I am afraid, trite, feeble, and contrived. The BBC programmers
had, I believe, planned to turn the six or seven hours of filming into an

66 The War Years

hour-and-a-half show, but the film is still in the BBC archives. I hope it
stays there. In spite of the BBC’s investment of skill and money, it pro-
vided no new illumination of the central enigma.

The Conundrum of Albert Speer

How, then, do I appraise Speer? I have never found a satisfactory
answer to that question. The Nuremberg judges decided he deserved a
long sentence, and he accepted it as fair. Rather than clarifying my own
thoughts, our interrogation — and my renewed acquaintance with Speer —
left me even more confused. Looking back, I realize that at the time of
our first meeting, I had been insufficiently aware of the full Nazi story
to put Speer in proper perspective. But since that time, the revolting
disclosures of Nuremberg had left no doubt of Hitler’s obscenities. I
knew I should feel repelled by Speer because his willing association with
the filthy Nazi thugs marked him as a man who had touched evil; yet,
try as I might, I could not sustain that mood. Speer was not at all in the
mold of the brutal Nazi; instead — and this is what made my relatively
tolerant attitude toward him so inexcusable — he seemed, to use Noel
Coward’s derisive phrase, “like us.’’ Thus, I could find no answer to the
obsessive question of how it had all happened.

Or did Noel Coward’s phrase suggest an answer that was inevitably
unsettling? Were America to experience similar moral degeneration and
a regime come to power that punished its dissenters not merely by death
but also by torture, might not some of my friends and acquaintances —
might not even I myself — yield to temptations such as those that had
corrupted Speer?

I have no doubt that at least some of my most righteous acquain-
tances would go along, advancing up the hierarchical ladder. Like Speer,
they would rationalize their actions. If things were bad, that would only
be temporary; once the nation achieved its objectives, repression would
be relaxed and a benign society could then emerge. Others would stand
sadly but prudently by, suppressing their outrage while doing their best
to stay out of trouble. Still others would try to flee the country with what-
ever they could take with them.

There would, one hopes, be a brave few — though I could not iden-
tify them with certainty — who would risk the terrors and rigors of a
resistance struggle. But I suspect it would be only a thin red line if they
knew that, once caught, they might be hung on meat hooks and sub-
jected to all the tortures a demonic imagination could devise.

My question is, of course, contrived. Like any organism with deep
and healthy roots, our country’s instincts and traditions should enable
us to produce the antibodies needed to resist such raging depravity. But
we dare not take that for granted. Had Watergate followed a different

Albert Speer on a Grade-B Movie Set 67

course and it could have, but for luck and an indefatigable press — had
the scrofulous gang around Nixon been allowed to grow more insolent
with each success, our basic institutions could have been dangerously
undermined. Nor should we forget the sixties, when hysteria threatened
to disrupt our educational institutions and we faced the danger of losing
the elite of a generation through drugs and “dropping out.”

Because it most acutely touched my own age group, I look back with
special horror on the suspicion, meanness, and betrayal of the McCarthy
period. America seemed transformed by virulent fear and demagog-
uery the same components Hitler used so effectively. Although the
McCarthy years did not, thank God, permanently damage the basic
framework of our institutions and the great bulk of our people were
not corrupted, it was still a portent. Had we then been in the midst of a
searing depression or been as angry and divided as during the Vietnam
War, I can think of several friends who might well have identified the
new reality with the wave of the future and thrown rocks as the tum-
brels rolled by.

I he gravamen of the indictment of Speer at Nuremberg was that he
had employed slave labor, a crime which he admitted. But what most
preoccupies anyone who speculates about culpability is his association
with the contemptible thugs who murdered more than ten million Slavs
and six million Jews. 4 No one can establish clearly just how much Speer
knew as against what he might have known — and I doubt that even he
was totally clear about it.

Yet, is it not the very fact that he seemed “like us”— or at least like
what we think we are — that leads us to the judgment that his conduct
was inexcusable.^ In elaborating this point, Professor Trevor-Roper has
suggested that, “in Hitler’s court,” Speer was morally and intellectually
alone, for

he had the capacity to understand the forces of politics, and the courage to resist
the master whom all others have declared irresistible. As an administrator, he
was undoubtedly a genius. He regarded the rest of the court with dignified con-
tempt. His ambitions were peaceful and constructive: he wished to rebuild Ber-
lin and Nuremberg, and had planned “at the cost of no more than two months’
war-expenditure (as he sadly protested in the dock at Nuremberg) to make
them the greatest cities in the world. Nevertheless, in a political sense, Speer is the
real criminal of Nazi Germany ; for he, more than any other, represented that fatal
philosophy which has made havoc of Germany and nearly shipwrecked the world.
Foi ten years he sat at the very center of political power; his keen intelligence
diagnosed the nature and observed the mutations of Nazi government and pol-
icy; he saw and despised the personalities around him; he heard their outra-
geous orders and understood their fantastic ambitions; but he did nothing.
Supposing politics to be irrelevant, he turned aside and built roads and bridges
and factories, while the logical consequences of government by madmen emerged.

68 The War Years

Ultimately, when their emergence involved the ruin of all his work, Speer accepted
the consequences and acted. Then it was too late; Germany had been destroyed.
[Italics added .] 5

Should we assume, as Trevor-Roper does, that because Speer was
the most intelligent and sensitive of the Nazis, he should be judged by a
more rigorous code than the others? Or does that question too cavalierly
ignore the full range of man’s adaptability and the illusion of normality
in the dim light of an aquarium?

Following our Munich television interview, Speer sent me a copy of
his memoirs. The inscription on the flyleaf thanked me “for today’s
meeting after twenty-six years” — then he added, “And the questions
remained the same!” For me, they always will.

PART III

Monnet, Europe, and

Law Practice

6. Jean Monnet

When I returned to Washington in the summer of 1945, I
felt, as did many Americans, that the war had put a semicolon, if not a
period, to all that had gone before. Ten years earlier I had left the highly
charged atmosphere of the yeasty New Deal in search of professional
experience. I his time 1 felt no such need to escape from Washington,
thanks to long days and nights in a Chicago law firm of high quality, I
was confident of my own professional abilities and, for reasons quite
different from those of the young Tom Wolfe, I could not go home
again. The New Deal, followed by the war, had shifted the nation’s cen-
ter of gravity to Washington, and I liked being — in the vernacular

where the action was.

But until I had established a private-sector port of return, I wished
to avoid fuither government jobs. Too many bureaucrats, in my obser-
vation, had been trapped in frustrating tasks or compelled to carry out
distasteful policies because they had no place to which they could retreat.
So I decided to join with friends in founding a new law firm to come
into being on January 1, 1946. Meanwhile, since the work of the Bomb-
ing Survey would terminate three or four months before that date, I
took an interim assignment with Jean Monnet as General Counsel of the
French Supply Council, which he was then reorganizing.

Early Background

Jean Monnet’s name was not then familiar to many Americans, but
among those involved in Allied war supply problems, he was a figure
about whom legends had already accumulated. Born in 1888 in the little
town of Cognac in the Department of Charente in southwestern France,

70 Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

he grew up as the fair-haired child of a middle-class family established
in the brandy business. The brand name “Monnet” was known the world
over, and the predilection of upper-class Englishmen for brandy-and-
soda helped shape Jean Monnet’s career. His formal schooling ended at
sixteen. He spent two years of apprenticeship in a London merchant
bank, after which he traveled as a brandy salesman, chiefly in England
but also in Canada and the United States.

His knowledge of English and of British methods served him well
when a perceptive French Prime Minister heard him diagnose supply
deficiencies during the dark days of World War I and appointed him, at
the age of twenty-six, French representative on the Inter-Allied Supply
Committee in London. What Monnet brought to that task were two sim-
ple but essential ideas. One was the analytic device of the consolidated
balance sheet, or bilati the second was a concept of 01 ganization. maxi-
mum utilization of resources could be obtained by fusing or “pooling
them. Simple as those ideas now sound, they were then regarded with
suspicion by bureaucrats and politicians on both sides of the Channel
conditioned to thinking only along narrow national lines. With his mind
uncluttered by slogans and precedent, Monnet instinctively understood
that the indispensable first discipline in operating any international sup-
ply system was to relate overall need to overall production and potential
capacity. The difference defined the production target. If the target was
too high, then requirement figures had to be reexamined and pared
down. But more often than not, the exercise resulted in expanding pro-
duction targets by forcing responsible officials to lace realistically the
price of victory. Though the technique so described sounds simple and
obvious, in relations between the Allies it was a startlingly new approach.
Marshal Ferdinand Foch once remarked that fighting a war of alliance
made him realize how easy had been Napoleon s job. Alliances have tailed
again and again because no partner ever knew what the others would
contribute or what each ally required to maintain its part ol the effort.

Once hostilities finally ended and the cynics at Versailles had pro-
duced the League of Nations (which the United States promptly
disowned), Monnet became its Deputy Secretary-General. In that capac-
ity, he spent two years working on solutions to the Saar problem between
France and Germany, the Silesian problem between Poland and Ger-
many, the Danzig question, and the currency and monetary headaches
from which a devastated Europe was suffering.

In 1925, after having restored the family business to a sound basis,
he became the French partner of the New York investment banking firm
of Blair & Company during the pyrotechnic period preceding the
depression of the thirties. Here his belief in consolidated balance sheets
was reinforced by grim experience, for while he was in Europe, his part-
ners combined his firm with another to form Bancamerica-Blait Cor-

Jean Monnet 7/

poration. Only when the merger was completed did the X-ray machine
of the consolidated balance sheet disclose that tangled intercorporate
1 elationships concealed liabilities larger than life-size. Monnet once told
me he had made and lost $5 million, but what he had learned was well
worth it.

Following the stock market debacle he worked in Sweden as liquida-
tor of Krueger & Toll; in Shanghai, as adviser to a League of Nations
mission reorganizing Chinese finances; and again in New York, as head
of a firm specializing in corporate reorganizations. But, a year before
the outbreak of the Second World War, Monnet’s career as private citi-
zen ended, thereafter, he was to be continuously in some form of public
activity. His Wall Street experience had, however, given him one asset
that was to serve him well: the respect and affection of several American
bankers and lawyers, including such f uture movers and shakers as Rob-
ert Lovett, John J. McCloy, John Foster Dulles, and Donald Swatland.

Monnet in World War II

In 1938, alarmed at the condition of the French Air Force, he per-
suaded Prime Minister Edouard Daladier to send him to the United States
to buy airplanes for the French government. Later, after the war broke
out, he became chairman of the Anglo-French Coordinating Committee
in London. Using that position with maximum effect, Monnet, in the
words of the official British Economic War History, . . confronted the
governments with devastating figures comparing Allied aircraft produc-
tion with German, as estimated by the two Air Staf fs and the Ministry of
Economic Warfare. In similar ‘balance sheets’ compiled later on, esti-
mates of requirements on the basis of accepted strategic plans took the
place of the speculative figures of enemy production.” 1

Dm ing the chaotic days just preceding the French collapse in 1940 —
in an action that might have changed the course of history — Monnet
devised the idea that Britain should offer the French people joint Anglo-
French citizenship, with a single cabinet and parliament. The Reynaud
government in Bordeaux faced a critical decision: demoralized and
defeated, should it capitulate to the Germans or move to North Africa,
togethei with the still intact French navy and as much of the army as
could be evacuated? The forty-nine-year-old Under Secretary of War,
Chailes de Gaulle, in the midst of defeat and exhaustion, supported
Monnet’s bold proposal for union as a tactical move that might persuade
a divided fiench cabinet to resist. It was one of the few occasions when
de Gaulle and Monnet saw eye-to-eye.

Once a convinced British cabinet had persuaded a reluctant Chur-
chill to favor Monnet’s scheme, de Gaulle, in London, flashed the word
to Bordeaux. But by June 16, 1940, it was a few hours too late. The

72 Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

Reynaud government had already made the fatal decision to resign, pav-
ing the way for General Petain’s succession and — less than forty-eight
hours later— a humiliating armistice. It was a shameful moment of wear-
iness and cynicism and disenchantment, of hysteria and the death of
idealism. Peering through the distorted lenses of their own despair, the
tired, weak leaders of the Third Republic saw nothing but a “plot" by
Britannia Militant — or Albion Perfidious — to gobble up the French
empire in its hour of ultimate weakness.

With his beloved Marianne trying on her chains, Monnet then vol-
unteered his services to the British government; Churchill made him
deputy chairman of the British Supply Council in Washington. Later,
following the North African invasion, Monnet played a major part in the
rapprochement between General de Gaulle, with his London Committee
(whose legitimacy as leader of France had not yet been established), and
the French general, Henri Giraud, who had been appointed commander-
in-chief of the French forces in North Africa by the Imperial Council,
which consisted of the Vichy proconsuls still in power. Monnet’s deep
concern was to avoid a power fight that might tear France apait once
victory was achieved.

After V-E Day, Monnet returned to Washington as president of the
French Supply Council. It was a job made urgent by the foolish and
irresponsible decision of Leo Crowley to halt Lend-Lease on August 2 1 ,
1 945. Now the French provisional government had to improvise its own
machinery to acquire the supplies desperately needed for fiances lav-
ished economy.

The Monnet Discipline

To operate that improvised machinery, Monnet needed lawyers. In
agreeing to serve as his general counsel, 1 limited my tenure to the three
months until our new firm would open for business. Much to my delight,
the assignment proved to be more substantive and less technical than my
title implied. Though I hired legal technicians to help establish and
operate a procurement apparatus, Monnet wanted my services for quite
a different purpose: to help him reduce his ideas to coherent exposition
and, in the process, help him think. Jean Monnet did not think like other
people. He circled a problem like an airplane approaching an under-
sized held in a cup of the mountains, volplaning down in ever tightening
spirals until he finally reached the runway he was seeking. \ et that met-
aphor is only partially accurate, for while zeroing in on a problem, he
would frequently dart off to explore a new target made visible by a sud-
den opening in the fog.

Our long communings were never routine. Though Monnet spoke
to me in colloquial English, he would often finish an English sentence in

Jean Monnet 73

French, quite unaware of what language he was speaking and since I am
a linguistic idiot, I would sometimes have to remind him when he made
an unconscious shift. He would propound a nebulous idea; I would
rephrase what I thought he was trying to say, relating the points he was
making to other thoughts he had expressed. Sometimes I would offer
an allusion or figure of speech to supply the vivid aphoristic summation
he habitually sought.

At the end of each such session, he would ask me for a draft paper
by some quite unrealistic deadline, such as later the same afternoon. He
was oblivious to the need for allocating time to other requirements, such
as sleeping or even eating. If we talked late into the evening, he would
still expect a paper to be ready first thing in the morning — and he usu-
ally had it.

How he might react to what I had written I could never predict.
Sometimes he would exclaim over an individual phrase or paragraph:
Good, or, That s it! But more likely than not, he would say with a
sad smile: “We haven’t got it,’’ or, “That’s not it yet.’’ Then we would
talk further, often veering off at a sharp angle from what I had written.
At the end, I would try again with the same inconclusive results. We put
one proposal through seventeen drafts, finally settling on a version much
closer to my initial effort than any that had followed. Usually, however,
the number varied between six and ten, depending on the purpose of
the exercise whether a formal note to the French or American govern-
ment, a magazine article, a speech for Monnet, the outline of a project,
or a suggested statement for someone else to make.

While Monnet profited by what I called our “collective spiral cogita-
tion,’’ I learned much from helping a wise man shape ideas like a sculp-
tor with a knife. My role was essential for Monnet himself was no writer.

I never knew him to draft a document; he evolved letters, papers, plans,
proposals, memoranda of all kinds by bouncing ideas against another
individual — a combined amanuensis and collaborator. James Reston, of
the New York Times , once despairingly asked during a strike of his news-
papei, How do I know what I think until I read what I write?’’ Monnet
faced the same problem; he needed to test and sharpen ideas by casting
them in the rigorous mold of a simple, persuasive, yet precise, formula-
tion. In addition, he required perfection in thought and statement. Even
the simplest letter must convey the exact meaning and nuance intended,
which could be achieved only by repeated redrafting and polishing. Once
he had achieved a formulation that satisfied him, Monnet might use it
again and again. “If an idea has been precisely phrased,’’ he contended,
it cannot be improved by extemporaneous restatement.’’

That he seemed always able to find men willing to submit to his stim-
ulating but exasperating methods of work testified to his extraordinary
charisma not in the current, vulgar, television sense but rather as Max

74 Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

Weber used the word to refer to “a certain quality of an individual per-
sonality” that sets him apart from ordinary men. The essence of his char-
isma was that Jean sought nothing for himself. It he could get others to
launch — and take credit for— his ideas, so much the better. Thus, any-
thing but an intellectual, Monnet could attract and even captivate intel-
lectuals, drawing on their technical talents without being intimidated by
them as Lyndon Johnson later allowed himself to be. He made no attempt
to master technical intricacies; that could be left to the specialists on whom
he depended. He concentrated on fundamental convictions evolved from
his rich experience.

With a rare instinct for the sources of power, he invariably identified
those individuals who could advance his special projects, employing his
friends as a kind of resource bank, and calling on men of particular
talents at the precise times when their skills could be most useful.

In working with Monnet and his colleagues, I was struck by how
often we proceeded from our disparate backgrounds to leach agiee-
ment on fundamental issues. With almost no formal education, Monnet
had his own special method of thought. Most of my other French col-
leagues, trained in the Cartesian discipline, began with hrst principles,
reasoning, like Aquinas or Hegel, from matter to spirit to matter, while
my American friends and I tended to reason like Hobbes and Hume,
from effect to cause to effect. Still, though hacking our way through the
trees by different paths, we usually came out at the same clearing in the
forest, and on one point we were unanimous — that the logic of Luio-
pean unity was inescapable.

Monnet’ 's Personality

From time to time I accused Monnet of behaving like a French peas-
ant — a charge that delighted him. Along with his earthy common sense,
he was subject to petty foibles that amused those of us who worked with
him. He would never sleep in a city if there were any possible alternative.
When in New York City, we might work until two or three o’clock in the
morning, but he would still insist on being driven to a friend’s house on
Long Island for the balance of the night. His personal battle with the
weather— and particularly with what he described as the “weight of the
atmosphere” — went on interminably. “The air is heavy today, he would
say sadly, as though it imposed an oppressive burden. When the air was
“good,” which presumably meant less humid, we all worked exception-
ally hard. ...

Though he felt at home in America and was inspired by its vitality

and spaciousness, he was most at ease in his thatched-roof house in Hou-
jarray, forty-four kilometers from Paris. I would, from time to time, stay
there with him and his gifted and enchanting Italian wife, Sylvia. Rising

Jean Monnet 75

from the breakfast table, Jean would hand me a stick, saying, “Let’s walk.”
As we began to ascend a small hill near the house, he would say, “Start
talking,” and I would try to regurgitate whatever ideas I had generated
overnight. Suddenly, he would grab my arm and point across the soft
French landscape to a small church or a peasant cottage. “Did you ever
see anything more beautiful?” Standing in respectful contemplation, I
would dredge up the appropriate banality; then he would abruptly push
me forward along the path and say, “Start talking again.”

I do not mean to imply that Jean Monnet was rude or indif ferent to
personal feelings; he merely put ideas ahead of trite civilities. He was, in
fact, genuinely concerned by personal misfortunes and interested in
everything his friends were doing. He hated large social affairs, but after
Ruth had repeatedly asked him to dinner, Jean finally accepted, condi-
tionally, “1 11 come if you won’t have anyone but the family.” During the
entire evening he paid little attention to either Ruth or me, conducting
a protracted dialogue with our eight-year-old son, Douglas, whose
remarkable knowledge of history he found fascinating.

Helping France Modernize

During our work together in the fall of 1945, Monnet was preoccu-
pied with the problem of how France could modernize and invigorate
its devastated and moribund economy. When only partially recovered
from the First World War, it was beset by a second, and during the
interwar years of the I hire! Republic, its economy remained ransomed
to the past in thrall to the spirit of Colbert and to habits of thought and
industrial practices that disabled it from keeping pace with a changing
world. Immobilisme contributed to the corruption of its institutions, as
confidence and vigor gave way to apathy and defensiveness. Thus enfee-
bled, France lost the war.

Granted a new chance, France had to act quickly to recover its latent
vitality, first by putting its own house in order and then by merging its
efforts with those of its neighbors. Anything but a dirigiste, Monnet still
saw the need to create an economic plan — not a Procrustean bed designed
by technocrats, but a mechanism through which, with minimum bureau-
cratic guidance, representatives of industry, agriculture, and labor could
work together to achieve mutually agreed upon targets.

After Monnet had left for Paris in November 1945 to establish and
administer the Plan for Modernization and Investment, I remained in
Washington, intending to leave the French Supply Council at the end of
the year to join my partners in our new law firm. Monnet amd I contin-
ued our communication, however, since Monnet was addicted to the
transatlantic telephone (in those days, an exercise in masochism because
voice transmission was solely by radio). To place a call normally required

76 Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

waiting anywhere from one to ten hours, while few calls were completed
without being interrupted by “atmospherics.” Frequently, just as Mon-
net was coming to the hard substance of his message, shouting at the top
of his voice, the line would go dead or the sound would be drowned by
a crescendo of roaring and crackling. I would be left in disturbing
uncertainty, since Monnet might be trying to tell me, as he frequently
did, to catch the night plane for Paris.

Leon Blums Washington Visit

During one of those calls, Monnet made a tempting request. Leon
Blum had been delegated to lead a mission to Washington to discuss
Franco- American relations. Would I act as Blum’s adviser, even though
it would mean postponing my joining our new law firm for several
months?

Time and events had softened Leon Blum’s public image as an irre-
sponsible intellectual, the hrst Socialist — and, incidentally, the hrst Jew-
ish— Premier of France. Many people, both in America and Europe, had
been upset by his Popular Front government in 1936 and 1937, not
merely because of its tolerance of the Communists but also because it
failed to expand French military strength to meet the mounting menace
of Nazism. Once World War II began, however, Blum had quickly shed
his pacihsm, supporting French defense efforts, disavowing Vichy, and
urging the Socialist party to oppose collaboration. A large man with a
massive, well-shaped head and a sensitive face to which large, sad eyes
and a drooping mustache gave a quality of tristesse, he exuded enormous
charm and sympathy. Taken into custody as “dangerous to the security
of the French state” on September 15, 1940, he had hrst been locked up
in France, then carted off to Buchenwald, where he was joined by his
third wife (who voluntarily made her way to the camp). I here they
remained together with other important hostages until April 3, 1945,
when Blum and his wife were taken by SS guards into the Tyrol. One of
his fellow captives — a German general — managed to smuggle out word
of their plight to the commandant of the German Army of Italy. As a
result, in a scene reminiscent of La Grande Illusion , the jittery SS guards
were suddenly disarmed by a company of the Wehrmacht commanded
by an officer of the old school, who, resplendent in the most correct of
uniforms, assured his prisoners that they were now protected by the
military honor of the German Army.

On his Washington mission in March 194b, Blum was accompanied
by his son, Robert, a quiet self-effacing man who, trained in engineering,
had become a top officer of the Hispano-Suiza Company. I was struck
by the touchingly close relationship between father and son. Blum lent
a sense of solemn dignity to our enterprise, but he left the negotiating

Jean Monnet 77

largely to Monnet, who was able to arrange with the United States gov-
ernment a $1.37 billion loan for French reconstruction.

The Marshall Plan

When, on July 1, I finally joined my new law firm, Monnet retained
us on behalf of the French government so he and I could continue to
work together. It was a nervous time, with the economies of the Euro-
pean countries declining alarmingly.

The Marshall Plan came just in time with its promise of help if the
nations of Europe could agree on “the requirements of the situation and
the part those countries themselves will take in order to give proper
effect to whatever action might be undertaken by this government.” 2 In
response, the British and french first met in a Big Three Conference
with the Soviets; then the USSR testily withdrew when faced with the
need to cooperate with other European states in determining require-
ments and allocating American aid.

Blessedly left on their own, the British and French issued a joint
communique on July 3, inviting twenty-two European nations to send
representatives to consider a common recovery plan and sixteen nations
accepted. 3 The conference established an interim Committee of Euro-
pean Economic Cooperation (CEEC) to analyze the economic resources
of the component nations, develop the principles for a European recov-
ery program, and agree in a preliminary way on what each nation should
be expected to accomplish and what aid it might need. The chairman of
the Committee was Sir Oliver Franks (now Lord Franks); Jean Monnet
was designated vice-chairman. The staff was headed by Monnet’s dep-
uty, Robert Marjolin, who was to become one of my closest friends.

On August 10, 1947, Monnet summoned me by telephone, and two
days later I was at work in an office under the stairs at 18, rue de Mar-
tignac, the headquarters of the French Planning Commission. It was a
tiny room (probably no larger than nine by ten feet), but it became my
intermittent hideout for several years. Monnet wanted my insights as an
American, but since he did not wish the other European representatives
to know he was consulting anyone from my side of the ocean, I worked
with him and his immediate staff only.

Soon the Committee produced an early draft of its final report. My
share in its intellectual content was de minimis — dealing largely with
diafting changes of tone and style to help make the document accept-
able in Washington. But I worried about substance as well, for I foresaw
that certain proposals of the Committee might collide with American
preconceptions of what the European nations were expected to present.
Not only did the cost of the provisional shopping list — $28 billion — seem
well above American estimates, but there was, in my view, too great an

7# Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

emphasis on a stabilization fund of $3 billion, which, 1 believed, would
find little sympathy in Washington. Nor did I think that the draft report
conveyed sufficient conviction that at the end of the four-year period of
American aid, the participating governments would have brought their
balance of payments into equilibrium. Increasing uneasiness in Wash-
ington had led the United States to propose a three- or four-week post-
ponement of the final draft of the report, but the Europeans seemed
bent on concluding their task as early as possible.

I told Monnet of my apprehensions and, with his blessing, flew on
September 3 to the United States, taking with me a pirated copy of the
Committee draft, which I showed to my old friends who were now in
the State Department, Charles Kindleberger and Paul Nitze. They agreed
that it would cause problems in its current form and that the State
Department would have to take a stronger hand to avert a serious mis-
understanding.

I do not know to what extent, if at all, my visit to Washington stimu-
lated American intervention, but the negative reaction of my friends was
presumably one of the reasons for an American-European meeting that
took place on August 30. At the same time, my telephone comments
regarding Washington’s reactions strengthened Monnet’s resolve to revise
the report in a manner more compatible with American opinion. Since
I had done all that an outsider could do in Washington, I flew back to
Paris on September 8 to help — at least marginally — in drafting the final
report.

Washington’s views w r ere presented by the Under Secretary of State
for Economic Affairs, Will Clayton, who was brilliantly equipped to deal
with the Europeans on these issues. A handsome, courtly, soft-spoken
southerner with a cotton broker’s passion for free trade, he regarded
the Marshall Plan as an opportunity to introduce the concept of a com-
mon market to Western Europe. As he later waote in 1963, “I discussed
this matter frequently with Jean Monnet who convinced me that West-
ern Europe was too weak in 1947 to accept conditions of regional free
trade. I recognized then that Monnet was correct in this viewpoint.
Europe had to get a good deal more flesh on its bones before setting up
a common market.” 4 But Clayton held to his position that a major Mar-
shall Plan objective was to get the Western European countries working
together. When representatives of three countries ref used to agree to a
permanent organization to succeed the CEEC, Clayton replied, with
unconcealed asperity, that “perhaps we are all pursuing a will o’ the wisp
and might as well forget about it.” The message was heard and heeded;
the three dissenting representatives promptly went home to their capi-
tals and, on returning, dropped their opposition.

1 remained in Paris w hile a Congressional delegation headed by Con-
gressman Christian Herter talked with the French government about

Jean Monnet 79

conditions in France and the need for foreign aid. Then, on September
28, I flew to London, where Herter was also visiting. Just after I arrived,
Monnet telephoned me in distress. A fortnight before, when he and I
had been idly chatting about the special qualities of the French peasant,
I had called attention to a press speculation that the gold stashed away
by French peasants under their mattresses might be worth at least $2
billion. Monnet had replied with a smile of affectionate admiration for
the peasants, I hat could be true." Apparently he had remembered the
conversation, for in emphasizing the inner strength and innate frugality
of the French people he had off-handedly mentioned the rumor to
Herter.

I hough it was only a trifling parenthesis in a long, informal conver-
sation, Herter promptly disclosed Monnet’s comment to the press. That
evoked cries of anguish both in French governmental circles and the
American administration, since stories of rich peasants might give xen-
ophobic Congressmen and Senators an excuse for voting against Mar-
shall Plan aid. At Monnet’s urgent request, I met with Herter and
persuaded him to make a clarifying — or, more accurately, an obfuscat-
es statement that somewhat lowered the noise level, but later in
November he testified to a Congressional committee about the alleged
secret hoard of gold and suggested a Congressional investigation. How
diligent legislators could possibly conduct such an inquiry he did not say,
since it would presumably involve poking around under several million
beds. In any event, the matter again caused trouble when Averell Har-
riman, leading the fight for the Marshall Plan, testified before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee.

A Permanent Organization for European Cooperation

Meanwhile, Monnet asked me to follow the Marshall Plan legislation
and to keep him advised of evolving American ideas of the permanent
European organization envisaged in the CEEC report. On this point, the
Europeans were understandably confused. In response to American
piessure, the drafters of the sixteen-nation report had included a pro-
vision for the creation of a permanent organization, and the British and
French had agreed to call a second meeting of the CEEC early in 1948
in which that question could be discussed. Toward the middle of Janu-
aiy, however, Under Secretary of State Robert Lovett expressed unex-
pected 1 esei vations, primarily on the ground that a meeting at such an
early date might annoy Congress. Lovett’s reaction was not well received
even among other American officials; early in February, the United States
Department of State withdrew its objections to reconvening the CEEC,
leaving the matter solely up to the Europeans.

Since the French and British still feared some ambiguity in Washing-

80 Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

ton’s attitude, Robert Marjolin, who had been given responsibility for
the proposed permanent organization, asked me, on February 24, to
sound out American sentiments on the substance and timing of Euro-
pean action. Concurrently, the British government sent Adam Denzil
Marris to Washington for the same purpose. M arris, a shrewd and per-
ceptive merchant banker, had served in the Ministry of Economic War-
fare in London in the early days of the war— then in the British embassy
in Washington, where he had learned the political folkways of the United
States. During the meetings of the CEEC, he had been deputy leader of
the United Kingdom delegation to the initial CEEC meeting and, together
with Monnet and Isaiah Berlin, had carried the laboring oar in drafting
the final report.

Marris and I consulted separately with the key officials of the United
States government, comparing notes at the end of each day. From long
conversations with, among others, Henry Labouisse, Dean Acheson,
Charles Kindleberger, and Robert Lovett, I concluded that the Ameri-
can government would welcome progress on the proposed permanent
organization as early as April. Since Marris reached the same conclusion,
we concerted our findings; on February 28, I sent a long message to
Monnet and Marjolin in substantially the same words as the telegram
Marris sent to his own government.

Meanwhile, Marjolin asked me to come to France to confer on the
drafting of plans for the new permanent organization, which would be
known as the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (the
OEEC) and would replace the temporary Committee for European
Economic Cooperation (the CEEC). I arrived in Paris shortly before the
second meeting of the ministers of the CEEC countries scheduled for
March 15, 1948. The French government hoped that the new perma-
nent organization would become “the expression of the lasting commu-
nity of the spirit of Europe” and — heavily influenced by Monnet
proposed a formal organization with an executive board that could make
decisions and take action between meetings of the larger conference. It
also suggested that there be a permanent international secretariat, headed
by a secretary-general, to supply the coordinating function.

British Objections

Foreshadowing the arguments that would later arise about the
European Economic Community, the British insisted on a loose body
limited to periodic consultations, rejecting the idea of an executive board
and an international secretariat, and strongly opposing a French pro-
posal to give the new agency and its executive head authority to allocate
American aid and stimulate European self-help. 1 here must not be, so
the British argued, even the merest hint that the members were relin-
quishing any aspect of national sovereignty. Nor should the organiza-

Jean Monnet 8 1

tion, as such, deal with the United States; each European nation should
negotiate bilaterally with America for its own share of assistance.

I he British still put excessive store in their “special relationship” with
the United States and failed, in Disraeli’s words, to understand “the rel-
ative mediocrity of their circumstances.” Fully as important was the fact
that Britain, with America’s help, had won the war, while the other
members of the group were, as one of my Dutch friends put it, “a club
of defeated nations. I he British thus thought of their country as on a
different level from the nations of the continent; being a co-victor, it
should deal with the United States as an equal.

Since the smaller European countries feared that Britain and France
would dominate the new organization, the eloquent Belgian Paul Henri
Spaak was made chairman. In addition, the conferees insisted that all
decisions be made by unanimous vote — a provision that the British would
have demanded in any event. Monnet’s interest in the OEEC ended at
this point, for he saw the liberum veto as the negation of incisive action.
1 hus, he did not applaud the elevation of his principal deputy, Robert
Marjolin, to secretary-general of the new organization. “I understand,”
he told me, why Marjolin wants to play a role in a major affair; it’s a big
job for a young man. He’ll do it as well as possible. But the OEEC’s
nothing; it’s only a watered-down British approach to Europe — talk,
consultation, action only by unanimity. That’s no way to make Europe.”

Monnet and Marjolin addressed problems from different angles
of attack. Monnet invariably set goals that might be approached but never
attained. Marjolin, whose task was to translate broad concepts into func-
tioning institutions, was necessarily aware of the limits of the feasible and
the need for compromise. I refrained from taking sides in the argument,
since I was devoted to both men. But their disparate attitudes illumi-
nated the basic question. Was Monnet really right in believing that a
change in institutions would cause men and women to conform their
thoughts and actions to a new set of principles? Could allegiance to a
united Europe some day play the same activating role that national sov-
ereignty had played in the past.- 1 Or did it really matter whether he was
right or not? Would not the insistent pressure for the unattainable goal
at least lead toward greater solidarity and common policies and actions
that could never be achieved by more modest objectives?

Marjolin did not believe that the concept of nationality could be dis-
placed within a single generation, or even several generations, merely
by creating new institutions. Patriotism had been the coalescing force
animating Germany’s neighbors to resist her ravaging armies in two world
wars, and Britain, in Marjolin’s view, was not ready for Europe. He did
not think as Monnet did — that deeply entrenched habits of thought
and action could be quickly modified in the pressure chambers of new
institutions.

I came out roughly in the middle. 1 could not believe that there would

82 Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

ultimately emerge anything like a United States of Europe, if by that
term one envisaged even a faint shadow of the federal system evolved
by thirteen rural colonies on the eastern margin of the American conti-
nent. The peoples of the great nations of Europe were burdened by too
much history, too much cultural and linguistic diversity, too intense an
ethnocentricity, and too many centuries of deliberately cultivating and
fiercely defending their national institutions to make the drastic adjust-
ments that federation, or even confederation, required. Still, it was use-
ful to hold out such a grand objecuve when accompanied by proposals
for limited but concrete actions. Even if Europe should not achieve fed-
eral or confederal status, it could improve its capacities for common action
by a process generally directed toward that goal. What was essential was
to keep the process going, not to lose momentum; that was Monnet s
constant preoccupation — and his great achievement.

As an American, I saw Europe’s developing capacity for common
action as essential to a stable world. W ith the Cold War at its height, the
world had split into two camps, each dominated by a colossus. Measured
by relevant statistics, the potential of a united Western Europe
approached that of the United States, but, so long as the peoples of
Europe remained emotionally and politically locked up within tight
national borders, they would be unable to participate effectively in affairs
outside their narrow parishes.

During 1949, I continued to work with Monnet on projects designed
to assure that the French Plan of Reconstruction received enough interim
funds from America to move effectively toward rehabilitating the French
economy. Since I spent about three and a half months in Paris during
that year — largely in connection with the establishment of a Palis office
for my law firm— Monnet and I had plenty of chances for long specula-
tive conversations.

The Saar Problem

We spent hours talking about the Saar— and its implications for
Europe. During his League of Nations days, Monnet had played a role
(albeit, a reluctant one) in working out a settlement that left the political
responsibility for the Saar with the League of Nations but gave France
full ownership of the coal that was its principal wealth. He had quite
accurately noted at that time that “the Saar cannot remain independent.
If the population insists, it will sooner or later return to Germany. ’ 5
Though he proposed a referendum, the French objected; they were
clearly bent on a takeover of the Saar’s economic resources.

Now he saw history repeating itself. I hough statesmen talked piously
about European unity, they were neither ready nor willing to give that
idea reality. French foreign policy was, Monnet felt, slipping limply into

Jean Monnet 83

outworn molds. Saar coal was being progressively incorporated into the
French economy, and negotiations were under way to give the Saar
political autonomy — while the Ruhr remained under an International
Ruhr Authority. 6 Such arrangements were inevitably a source of fester-
ing discontent among the Germans.

The Mood in Europe

It is difficult, after three decades, to recall vividly the suspicions and
anxieties that prevailed in Europe — and particularly in France — just four
years after V-E Day. Men and women were painfully adjusting to a new
and strange world, while still trying to purge their country of the bitter-
ness, shame, and mutual distrust that were the residue of protracted
occupation. That France was no longer a major world power as it had
been for centuries was a sharp nettle for its leaders to grasp (though less
painful than for the British, who only fully grasped it twenty years later).
Though the United States nurtured and protected the convalescent West
with her money and power, the rising menace of the Soviet Union dis-
turbed the french by nightmare visions that their country might be lost
in the shuffle of a bipolar Cold War. Because Frenchmen were fiercely
determined that a strong Germany would never rise again, some of them
sympathized with the bizarre view advanced by Secretary of the Treas-
ury Henry Morgenthau during the war that Germany should be reduced
to a pastoral state.

Still, the future depended on America, and American leaders were
now having quite different thoughts. With the intensification of the Cold
War, Washington increasingly wished to interpose a strong West Ger-
many between Soviet tanks and the rest of Western Europe. To resist
Moscow’s pressure, West Germany must be permitted to rebuild its eco-
nomic strength and develop a political identity. Thus, while France vainly
protested, America agreed to the raising of West German production
levels. On April 8, 1949, the Accords of Washington recognized the
existence of a West German state with elections to follow in April. Ger-
man rearmament could not be long postponed.

1 hroughout France, fear and distrust were inevitably revived. In Paris
during 1949, even an itinerant American could sense a resurgence of
introspection, a slackening of vitality, and the insidious exhumation of
old, dark rivalries, fears, and complexes. No one was more worried than
Jean Monnet by this accelerating trend. It was axiomatic to him — as to
all good Europeans — that lasting peace could be achieved only by
bringing France and Germany together and exorcising the demons of
the past. Such an initiative was urgently needed, and Monnet rose to the
occasion.

84 Monnet, Europe, and Law Pracuce

7 . The Parturition of Europe

Unlike Dean Acheson, I was not “present at the creation.”
During the first half of 1950, an increasingly busy law practice kept me
in the United States, and while Monnet and I talked constantly on the
telephone, we could speak only in cryptic terms about matters not in the
public domain. Thus 1 first learned from the press that on May 9 the
French government had put forward a plan for pooling European coal
and steel production. 1 was sure, of course, that it was Monnet s doing,
and I was disappointed that he had not sent for me at the outset. But I
knew that, sooner or later, I was certain to be summoned. So I felt relieved
rather than surprised when Monnet telephoned on June 18 with his
familiar request: “Be here tomorrow.” Because my plane was delayed, I
did not arrive until evening at rue de Martignac, where I found Monnet,
Pierre Uri, whom I then knew only slightly, Etienne Hirsch, who had
already become a good friend, and Professor Paul Reuter, of whom I
had never heard and who disappeared from the Monnet camp soon
afterwards.

The Inception of the Schuman Plan

I found it by no means easy to catch up with all that had occurred in
the five intense weeks since the basic concept of Monnet s coal and steel
plan had been first disclosed to Foreign Minister Robert Schuman early
in May. The action had been kept within a tiny circle, and neither Mon-
net nor his hard-pressed colleagues could now spare the time to explain
the full course of events — not even to a comrade who had fought on the
same barricades in the past.

With no comment other than: “Big things are happening. Read this,”
Monnet handed me a sheaf of papers. For the next hour or so, I quietly
tried to assess the exact state of the play, to ingest from memoranda
designed for different readers a mass of information, and to trace the
evolution of the central ideas. While I was busy with my reading mate-
rial, an involved discussion swirled around me in French, which undei
the best of conditions, I could understand only with intense concentra-
tion.

Among the papers in the dossier were successive drafts of Schuman s
May 9 proposal, which 1 had seen summarized in the American pi ess.
Most revealing was a memorandum of May 3 marked seciet piepaied
as a brief for Schuman to use with his cabinet colleagues. Entitled “Notes

The Parturition of Europe 85

de Reflexion, it began with a catalogue of French anxieties. “Whichever
way one turns, one encounters in today’s world only blind alleys — the
growing acceptance of an inevitable war, the unresolved problem of
Germany, the slow recovery of France, the need to organize Europe and
to find a place for France in Europe and in the world.’’ To escape from
such a dead end required concrete and resolute action directed at a lim-
ited but decisive sector in order to bring about a fundamental change in
that sector and, by degrees, modify the terms of the total problem. The
coal and steel proposal had been formulated in that spirit.

“With the crystallization of thought on the Cold War,” the Notes con-
tinued, all actions and decisions will be viewed in relation to their effect
on that War.’’ The rigidity of thought resulting from this narrow objec-
tive would block the search for solutions to fundamental problems and
would inevitably bring about conflict. To alter that dangerous course
required a change in the spirit of men, which could be accomplished not
by woids but only by a profound, real, immediate and dramatic action
that changes things and gives reality to hopes in which people are now
ceasing to believe.”

I he problem of Germany — so the argument proceeded — was rap-
idly becoming a cancer; it could be dangerous to the peace and to France
if Get man energies were not directed toward hope and the collaboration
with free peoples. Without doubt the Americans would insist that Ger-
many be given its place in the Western orbit not only because they wanted
to accomplish something and had no other solution, but also because
they doubted Fiench solidity and dynamism. But the German problem
could not be settled within the framework of existing conditions. France
must seek to change those conditions through a dynamic action that
would give direction to the spirit of the Orman people rather than
merely search for a static settlement based on current conditions.

If the question of Germany s industrial production and its capacity
t° compete were not rapidly resolved, France’s recovery would be halted.
Gei many was already asking to raise its steel production from eleven to
fourteen million tons and, though the French would object, America
would insist; at the same time, French production would flatten out, or
even fall. If nothing were done to change the direction of events, Ger-
man production would expand, Germany would dump exports, French
industry would demand protection, prewar cartels would be recreated,
and Germany would move toward the East as a prelude to political
agreements, while France would fall once again into the rut of a limited
and protected production.

Piompt action was essential, since under American pressure, the
decisions that would set these forces in motion would be initiated, if not
made final, at the forthcoming conference in London. Yet the United

86 Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

States did not want matters to develop in that manner; it would welcome
another solution, provided it were dynamic, constructive, and — above
all — put forward by France.

Pooling coal and steel would render moot the issue of German
industrial domination, since it would create the conditions for common
expansion with competition but without domination. It would put French
industry on an equal footing with German industry, enabling it to par-
ticipate in European expansion without fear of dumping by the German
steel industry and without feeling compelled to join cartels.

All the steps taken so far toward bringing unity — the OEEC, the
Brussels Pact, the Council of Europe — had done little to organize Europe.
England would agree to nothing that might loosen its ties with the
Dominions or commit it to Europe to a degree greater than the commit-
ments America itself made. Germany could not, without change in the
existing state of affairs, be brought into the organization of Europe. Thus
the course on which we were now engaged would lead to an impasse ,
while we would lose forever this critical moment in which Europe might
be organized.

To create a dynamic Europe would not preclude building an associ-
ation of “free” people in which the United States participated; on the
contrary, because such an association would encourage liberty and
diversity, a Europe that had adapted to the new conditions would develop
its own creative potential and become a force for stability.

Up to now, Europe had never existed; no aggregation of sovereign-
ties meeting together in councils created an entity. A real Europe must
be created — a Europe that appeared as such to European and American
opinion and had confidence in its own future. “At the present moment,”
so the paper continued, such a “Europe can be brought to birth only by
France. Only France can speak and act,” and if France fails to speak and
act quickly, the Western nations will cluster around the United States for
a more forceful pursuit of the Cold War . 2 England will draw closer and
closer to the United States, Germany will develop rapidly, and France
will be unable to keep it from arming. France will once again be vulner-
able to the Malthusianism of yesteryear, which will, in the long run, bring
about its obliteration.

The increase of German production and the escalation of the Cold
War would lead the French to fall back again into their psychology of
fear at the very moment when audacity could revive the French spirit by
the progressive actions for which France was ready. France was marked
by destiny. If it were to take the initiative to eliminate fear, bring about a
rebirth of hope, and make possible the creation of a force for peace,
then it could liberate Europe. “In a liberated Europe the spirit of men
born on the soil of France, living in liberty and in constantly improving
material and social conditions, can make its essential contribution.”

The Parturition of Europe 8y

The Haunting Problem of German Rearmaments

I hat was the essence of “Notes de Reflexion” — the quintessential
argument of Monnet and his colleagues. It was a French argument to
persuade Frenchmen — not for foreign eyes. Though by no means anti-
American, it took full account of the gnawing French preoccupation of
the time: France as a nation had lost the power of independent action.
As expressed in 1978 by Frangoise Giroud, the former French Secretary
of State for Culture, France felt itself “chained to a blind giant.” 3 In
Monnet’s view, the giant was not blind, merely busy. America had good
judgment, but while it concentrated on the Cold War, Europe’s vital
interests would be overlooked. Meanwhile, as Britain aligned herself with
the United States, Germany would rearm and become economically
dominant, leaving France — victimized by fear and impotence — to turn
helplessly in on herself. There was a solid basis for such anxieties. Had
Monnet not persuaded the weak 1 hird Republic government to put for-
ward the Schuman Plan, which, in turn, made possible (perhaps even
inevitable) the later initiative of the European Economic Community,
affairs might well have evolved toward the dour situation foreseen in
“Notes de Reflexion.”

I o avoid that drift, France and Germany needed to come to terms
on a basis of equality, which was possible, as Monnet saw it, only through
a substantial merging of interests. That the merging might be initiated
in the limited sphere of coal and steel reflected Monnet’s tactical genius.
Instead of talking, as politicians constantly talked, about creating unity
on a broad front — which meant, in practice, the proliferation of impo-
tent symbols, such as the Council of Europe — Monnet saw the chance
for a major breakthrough in a narrow sector. In a figurative sense, he
adapted to politics a tank warfare tactic General de Gaulle had futilely
advocated in the late thirties: concentrate all available power on a limited
point, then spread out behind the lines.

In proposing to act in the narrow sector of coal and steel, Monnet
hoped that nations might be willing to entrust sovereign powers to insti-
tutions that could form the nucleus of a future European government.
Of course, we all knew it was irrational to carve a single economic sector
out of the jurisdiction of nation-states and subject it to the control of
supranational institutions, but its very irrationality should compel prog-
ress. Once coal and steel were pooled, it would become imperative to
pool other production as well.

Anticartel Measures

A common market that was simply a customs union was not enough;
fiee movement would also require measures to prevent monopolistic

88 Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

arrangements among producers. But many of Monnet s European col-
leagues were shocked when he insisted on strong provisions against car-
tels. Because, of his years in the United States, Monnet was generally
familiar with American antitrust legislation, and he quite naturally con-
sulted his old friend John J. McCloy, the American High Commissioner
in Germany, who was charged with, among other things, deconcentrat-
ing the coal and steel industry of the Ruhr. At the same time, he had to
avoid any suggestion that the anticartel provisions of the Schuman Plan
Treaty were imposed by the Americans.

Since Robert Bowie, a shrewd and able Harvard law professor, was
assisting McCloy in negotiating deconcentration arrangements with the
Germans, Monnet consulted him on this particular aspect of the Schu-
man Plan Treaty. I encountered Bob Bowie on several occasions when
he arrived in Paris with drafts and re-drafts of proposed anticartel arti-
cles. These were, in turn, rewritten in a European idiom by Maurice
Lagrange of the Conseil d’Etat, who, as a skilled draftsman, had major
responsibility for giving formal legal expression to the ideas of Monnet
and his colleagues.

As a result, two articles of the final treaty (Articles 65 and 66 ) embod-
ied the most advanced American antitrust thinking, enunciated in lan-
guage that Europeans could understand. But understanding did not
mean ready acceptance; old habits die prolonged deaths, and those pro-
visions provoked a major struggle that lasted more than four months.
The problem confronting McCloy and Bowie was delicate. Ruhr coal was
still marketed through a common sales agency, which would, as the
French saw it, give the Germans too much bargaining power within the
Common Market, while failure to break up the great steel concerns
would, they feared, further reinforce German dominance of the pool.

From earliest postwar days, the Germans, by conditioned reflex, had
resisted deconcentration and decartelization. When the outbreak of the
Korean War led America increasingly to look toward West Germany as
the main forward element of Western defense, Washington s zeal for
deconcentration progressively diminished. Without the Schuman Plan
proposal, America’s efforts to decartelize Ruhr industry would probably
have come to very little.

As a matter of tactics, Monnet found it useful to let his old friend
McCloy take the lead in negotiating not only with the German political
authorities and the Ruhr industrialists but also with the French and Brit-
ish as occupying powers. Fortunately, Monnet’s efforts found sympathy
even within the German delegation. Though Adenauer’s first thought
had been to appoint a German industrialist to represent his country at
the Schuman Plan negotiations, Monnet persuaded him that, since the
treaty was not a technical matter, he needed a man who could fully
appreciate the political significance of the undertaking. Adenauer then

The Parturition of Europe 8g

selected Professor Walter Hallstein, a distinguished law professor who
had taught at Georgetown University in Washington. He understood the
American federal system, and particularly, American antitrust laws. With
the skillful persuasion of McCloy and Bowie, America’s deconcentration
proposals and the Schuman Plan Treaty were crafted to reinforce one
another. In the end, Adenauer could present the deconcentration mea-
sures as his government’s proposals, “on the assumption that the Schu-
man Plan would be in effect.”

1 8, Rue de Martignac

Throughout the year that the treaty was being negotiated, 18, rue de
Martignac was the scene of frantic activity. Its graveled courtyard was
filled with official Citroens still painted the olive drab that had marked
their wartime usage, while helmeted messengers recklessly wheeled their
motorcycles in and out. Clearly something important was in progress —
a big affair as Monnet called it. Few escaped a sense of excitement.

I ve been to many international conferences,” a seasoned European
diplomat told me, “but this is the first time I’ve ever seen the delegates
working to achieve something they all believed in rather than merely
trying to defend narrow national concerns.”

Happy to be even on the fringes of an event that I felt might even-
tually transform Europe, I again ensconced myself under the stairs, vis-
iting Monnet only when he called. The house was cut up into tiny rooms
crudely furnished. Behind Monnet’s modest office was a small dining
100m, where he and I often ate food cooked by a motherly housekeeper,
d heie were back stairs behind the dining room, which gave me a means
of egress in case Europeans arrived. My situation was unique in that I
was a private American actively working on the Schuman Plan for a par-
ticipating government; in addition, other Americans were officially
involved in trying to influence various aspects of the treaty. Chief among
them was David Bruce, then the United States ambassador to Paris. A
resourceful and loyal supporter of Monnet’s efforts since his days as
chief of the ECA Mission to France, Bruce was a major source of strength.
Quite likely his most effective contribution was to give scope and
encouragement to his young financial attache, William M. Tomlinson.
Tommy became a central figure in Monnet’s scheme of things. Slight of
build and only thirty-two years old in 1950, he had grown up in Idaho
and letained a Westerners fierce disdain for protocol and bureaucratic
obscurantism. Instinctively grasping the full implications of Monnet’s
objectives, he was impatient with more plodding intellects who so often
missed the point. As financial attache, he reported to the Treasury
Depai tment, where pedestrian technicians had little understanding or
sympathy for the political concept of a unified Europe, but Tommy’s

90 Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

irresistible force of intellect and energy defeated their obstructionist
fumbling. Not only did he dispose of Treasury resistance, he, in time,
became a dominant influence on the State Department. A master of
maneuver, he reported so copiously as to swamp, and thus paralyze, the
less diligent Washington bureaucracy, and, when he received instruc-
tions that he found unacceptable, he reacted with such fury and cogency
that Washington tended to leave him alone.

I had known Bruce earlier; now Tommy and I became such close
co-conspirators that during periods of crisis 1 would sometimes move
my operations to a small office in the embassy chancery adjacent to his.
The arrangement was particularly valuable to me, since 1 needed to dic-
tate in English and embassy secretaries were much better equipped for
that purpose than anyone on Monnet’s staff. It was an odd arrangement
but it worked. Tommy and I conspired with Monnet in full mutual con-
fidence, sensitive to the problems he was encountering. Monnet, in turn,
recognized Tommy’s problems in dealing with Washington. Such a com-
plete sharing of information and insights could arise only among indi-
viduals totally dedicated to a central idea; we all believed fervently in
Monnet’s goal of a united Europe, which, we thought, was quite as
important to Americans as to Europeans.

Very often I found myself working with Tommy late into the night 4
after which he would disappear to visit the nightspots, since he relaxed
as vigorously as he worked. Though he had suffered a cardiac weakness
ever since his youth, it did not deter him from committing himself com-
pletely to whatever he was doing. In the end, the intensity of his work
with Monnet cost him his life. A true hero of the European effort, he
suffered a stroke in 1954, at the age of thirty-six, and died a year later.

One minor incident during my work with Tommy illustrates the
fatuity of government red tape. At six o’clock one morning, a young
marine guard, after searching my briefcase, firmly announced that some
documents marked “Secret’’ could not be taken from the building. It
took me ten minutes to explain that the papers belonged to the French
government rather than the American government. “ Sekray 1 said —
giving the word an exaggerated French pronunciation — “not secret. He
finally, though grudgingly, yielded.

Impact of the Korean War

I shall never forget Monnet’s reaction to news of the Korean War.
The preparatory conference on the Coal and Steel Community had
begun on June 20, 1950, and on Sunday, June 25, 1950, I had gone to
Houjarray for a day of work. During the afternoon, after three or four
Europeans from other delegations had assembled, someone arrived with
word that the North Korean Army had invaded South Korea. Monnet

The Parturition of Europe 9/

saw the implications in this announcement almost faster than Washing-
ton. 1 he Americans, he declared, would never permit the Communists
to succeed with such naked aggression, since that would begin the ero-
sion of lines drawn with such difficulty during the postwar years. Yet for
Ameiica to intervene in Korea would not only jeopardize the Schuman
Plan, it might well create panic in Europe and increase American insis-
tence on a larger German role in the defense of the West.

1 he last point, of course, was of special importance. Morgenthau’s
idiotic plan to turn the German landscape into a pastoral painting by
Millet had been long forgotten. The defeated peoples must be brought
back, cautiously at first, into the family of Western civilization, encour-
aged 111 their first experiments with democracy, and integrated into a
larger Europe. The Berlin Blockade in the autumn and winter of 1948-
*949 pushed the issue to the fore, requiring re-examination of ear-
liei conclusions about German disarmament and speeding up the time-
table for ending the occupation and reestablishing German control of
their own affairs. But it was not easy for Europeans to adjust their think-
ing to an arrangement that would mean a reversal of wartime alliances.
France and the Benelux countries still bore the visible wounds of Nazi
brutality, Coventry remained a scarred city; only five years had passed
since the macabre funeral pyre outside the bunker in Berlin.

Saved ftom the searing scars of invasion and occupation, we Ameri-
cans found it easy to take a flexible line, but the differences of power
and interest, perspective and psychology between America and Europe
were becoming increasingly awkward. Monnet, more than anyone else,
knew that the prospect of German rearmament could lead Frenchmen
to hesitate before entering the Coal and Steel Community with the Ger-
mans. But, as usual, he sought to turn every potential setback into an
opportunity. Once the United States proposed at a conference in the
Waldorf Astoria Towers on September 12, 1950, to bring Germany into
NATO, Monnet altered his own timetable.

1 think it almost certain that, had the Korean War not accelerated
the push for German rearmament, Monnet would soon have pressed the
leaders of France, West Germany, and the other members of the Six to
create a political community. But events forced the issue. American
insistence on rebuilding a German national army could provoke bitter
and frightened responses that would drastically set back the cause of
unification, particularly if French resistance to such a move separated
fiance from its allies. To avoid such a development, Monnet, although
1 at the time, quickly put forward a scheme to organize Europe’s defense
roughly along the lines of the Schuman Plan. The proposal was first
made to Prime Minister Rene Pleven, who years before had been Mon-
nets assistant in Polish loan negotiations. Monnet also sent a copv to
oreign Minister Robert Schuman, who was negotiating in New York.

92

Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

Proposal for a European Army

A few days later, in a second memorandum to Pleven, Monnet pro-
posed that, before meeting again with its allies on October 28, the French
government should publicly reject German rearmament on a national
basis, suggesting instead the formation of a European army within a
European Defense Community, in which the Germans would partici-
pate. On Tuesday, October 24, 1950, Pleven presented to the French
Assembly what became known as the Pleven Plan, and it was promptly
approved.

As drafted, the proposal outlined plans for a European army under
a single European executive, with all elements in that army wearing a
common European uniform, receiving identical pay, training undei a
common system, and serving under an integrated command in the
beginning, at the army corps level. Germany would be asked to raise
twelve divisions, a tactical air force, and light naval forces. A political
commissariat would, in effect, be Europe s defense ministi y, with author-
ity to form, recruit, and train the European army, determine common
rates of pay and rules of recruitment, and play a major part (in coopei-
ation with the national parliaments) in determining military budgets.
These proposals were formally embodied in a treaty signed by France,
Germany, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands on May 27, 1952. An
additional protocol of agreement in April 1954 committed Britain to
keeping four divisions and a fighter air force on the continent indefi-
nitely.

Though initially skeptical, Secretary of State Acheson now gave the
European army plan strong diplomatic support, but anti-European ele-
ments mouthed a ferocious propaganda attack, with General de Gaulle,
joined by the Communists, leading the opposition to what he called a
“stateless melting pot. ” Opponents on the Left and Right then ti ied, with
success, to distort the vote into a referendum on German militarism.
The result was a four-year fight, which the brilliant French journalist-
philosopher Raymond Aron later described as the greatest ideological
and political debate France had known since the Dieyfus Affaii .

Meanwhile, the parliaments of four of the six signatory nations rati-
fied the European Defense Community (EDC) Treaty; but the Fourth
Republic proved too weak. Prime Minister Mendes-France, preoccupied
with extricating his country from Indochina, had other fish to fry; by
deliberate inaction, he let the French Assembly kill the treaty.

Years later, it became fashionable in some American circles to regard
the European Defense Community as a jerry-built contraption that never
had a chance for success. Some even referred to it as an American idea
that f ailed because of excessive American zeal. I o anyone who watched
the situation from a close vantage point, such comments reflect an abys-

The Parturition of Europe 95

mal ignorance of the facts, an insensitivity to the tides and currents of
the time, and the fashionable but fatuous tendency of some American
intellectuals to blame our own country for all blunders or defeats.

Pressure from our government was not the reason for the plan’s fail-
ure; on the contrary, it was American support that enabled the propo-
nents to come close to success. The primary reason for failure was the
unwillingness of any of a succession of flabby French governments to
risk putting the plan to a parliamentary test. Meanwhile, Gaullist oppo-
sition grew more virulent, national frustration over the Indochinese War
took an increasingly disastrous turn (Dien Bien Phu fell in 1954), and
Britain’s refusal to merge its troops into the “continental army” helped
undermine the plan’s limited appeal to the French people.

I still lament the failure of ratification. Had an integrated European
army come into being, the battalions of retrograde nationalism would
have been held in check; fears of a rearmed Germany would have sub-
sided; the momentum toward unity would have continued; Franco-Ger-
man rapprochement would have advanced within a congenial framework;
and General de Gaulle might have found it impossible to pull apart the
NA'I O collective security arrangements as he did twelve years later.
Ironically enough, only two months after the failure of the EDC, the
German Federal Republic became a member of NATO. French fear of
German rearmament had created a German national army which the
EDC would have prevented; that, to many Frenchmen, meant a begin-
ning of the revival of German nationalism.

In August 1952, with the ratification of the Coal and Steel Commu-
nity by six national parliaments, Monnet became the first President of
the Community’s High Authority. Without waiting for the EDC, the
Council of Ministers of the Coal and Steel Community had asked the
Community s Common Assembly to coopt eight additional members to
draft a treaty for a European political — as distinct from defense — com-
munity. Within six months, by March 10, 1953, that draft was ready.
Unhappily, with the fierce opposition from both the extreme Left and
Right focused on the EDC debate, attention to the treaty was postponed;
in the end, events overtook it. Nonetheless, had Great Britain joined to
balance the weight of Germany, both the EDC and the European Politi-
cal Community might have come into being.

The failure of the European army (the EDC) was a severe blow to
Monnet, and a less resilient man would have regarded it as fatal to his
hopes foi uniting Europe. But, as usual, Jean accepted it as merely a
tactical setback. Still, he could look with little kindness on those who had
joined in the destruction of his initiative, and particularly Mendes-France,
who, as Prime Minister, had by inaction permitted the French Assembly
to deny ratification. Nor could Monnet be enthusiastic when, two months
later, Mendes-f ranee collaborated with Anthony Eden in expanding the

94 Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

Brussels Treaty into the Western European Union (WEU). Many
Frenchmen who felt guilty about the EDC’s failure hailed this new move
as a welcome substitute; in fact, however, it was only a pallid ghost.
Though it provided for a consultative assembly, it was little more than a
military arrangement.

Pierre Mendes-France

Mendes-France was a man of subtlety and complexity, with a back-
ground of scholarship and a deep concern for France’s problems. I liked
him and admired the skill and incisiveness with which he had extracted
his country from its “dirty war” in Indochina. Ten years later, when my
own country was fighting its own “dirty war” on the same terrain, I found
myself saying, “Mendes-France, better thou shouldst be living at this hour.
America has need of you.”

To enlist American support for his initiative, Mendes-France planned
a trip to America, and since my firm was an adviser to the French gov-
ernment, he asked me to come to Paris to help prepare him for his trip.

I worked with him for a week in Paris, then returned to the United
States. Meeting him in Montreal, I reviewed and revised his draft
speeches and prepared him for press interviews and television appear-
ances.

I was troubled by the assignment and discussed it first with Monnet.
He was not pleased by the thought that 1 might help Mendes-France
persuade Americans that the WEU was a legitimate step toward unifying
Europe or in any sense a substitute for the European army. Still, he was,
as always, realistic. “You’re representing the French government,” he
said, “and you must do what the Prime Minister asks or resign your
retainer. I understand, so don’t worry about it. You have to do what you
have to do.” I also consulted my wise friend David Bruce, who was by
then America’s special representative to the European Coal and Steel
Community. He was equally insistent that I avoid passing off the WEU
improvisation as a substitute for the EDC.

I enjoyed working with Mendes-France, though, as an intellectual,
he regarded the world in a quite different manner from Monnet. Dur-
ing the war, he had been a heroic figure in the Resistance, and I listened
with interest to his plans for saving the Fourth Republic from an insidi-
ous decline. As Prime Minister, he had started a campaign against alco-
holism, calling it an enemy of French efficiency and trying to persuade
Frenchmen to drink milk rather than wine. That once led to what might
have been an embarrassing situation. One afternoon, when he and I
were in a railroad compartment traveling from Washington to New York,
a newspaper photographer walked in just as I was pouring a drink from
a bottle of Scotch. I shoved it under the table only just in time.

The Parturition of Europe 95

While the I reaty of Paris that created the Coal and Steel Community
was still being negotiated, Walter Lippmann insisted that I write a book
about it. He even enlisted Cass Canfield, then head of Harper’s, to offer
me a contract for such a book. The work occupied a great deal of my
time over many months. Lippmann read and edited the first few chap-
ters and promised to write an introduction. Though I completed most
of the manuscript, the book was never published. Monnet, who had ini-
tially approved the book in principle, decided — after reading some of
my text — that it was too soon to reveal so much about what had been
thought and done.

In November 1954, Monnet announced that he would not stand for
another term as President of the Coal and Steel Community and upon
returning to private life, founded the Action Committee for the United
States of Europe. Meanwhile, I was retained as an adviser by all three of
the communities that came into being: the Coal and Steel Community,
Euratom, and, later, the European Economic Community. That did not
end my work with Monnet, which continued on a nonprofessional basis.

I consulted with him informally in Europe and performed my familiar
role as amanuensis and intellectual punching bag whenever he came to
the United States.

Monnet's Final Years

On Thanksgiving Day in 1977, I dined with Jean and Sylvia Monnet
m their home in Houjarray. As a gesture to an old friend and to Amer-
ica, Sylvia had not only procured a turkey, but, by the exercise of consid-
eiable effort and imagination, had also found cranberries and made
chestnut dressing. It was a quiet, deeply satisfying, but triste occasion.
Jean and I both knew we would probably never meet again; there was
still a sparkle in his eye, but he was very feeble. “I’m not ill, George,” he
said, “just old.” He was very old— eighty-nine at the time— though his
mind was clear, and his indomitable optimism scarcely diminished. “It’ll
go on, he said. What we ve started will continue. It has momentum.”

We talked about our work together over the years, and he asked his
usual searching questions about my life. Was I happy? How was I spend-
ing my time:' 1 hen he observed, as he had on so many occasions: “George,
you should stop diffusing your energies.” That comment had formed
the leitmotij of many of our conversations during the years that I worked
closely with Monnet. Yet, even more persuasive than his words was the
testimony of his own career. Men of genius can sometimes validate cliches
that have lost their vitality, and Monnet’s life confirms the old saying
that a deeply committed man can move mountains. Yet to do so he
must, like Monnet, possess indefatigable energy, an uncommon measure
of both resilience and resourcefulness, and the willingness to forgo all

g 6 Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

personal gain and glory in the single-minded pursuit of a transcendent
purpose.

Monnet and de Gaulle Compared

In later years, I sometimes tried to compare Monnet with that other
great Frenchman whom I met on several occasions, General Charles de
Gaulle. I have no doubt that, of the two, Jean Monnet was the greater,
though that was a matter on which Walter Lippmann and I could never
agree. Lippmann was an ardent Gaullist, seeing in the General a man
who imperiously disdained the petty affairs that preoccupied other
political leaders. In a television interview in 1965, he had described de
Gaulle as “a man who can’t see very clearly what’s right in front of him,
who sees pretty well what’s across the room, or halfway down the street,
but who sees absolutely perfectly what’s in the distance. He has the far-
thest vision, he can see farther than any man in our time. 5 Later, dis-
cussing the interview with Walter I called attention to that passage. De
Gaulle, I conceded, could see farther than any man in our time. "There
is no doubt,’’ 1 said, "that he can look out over the centuries. But de
Gaulle’s great weakness is that he habitually faces backwards, seeing the
centuries that are past, not the future that is to come. Overlying all his
accomplishments has been a sense of nostalgia, a groping back toward a
past that can’t be recovered or even imitated. De Gaulle’s obsession is to
establish France on a par with the global powers in spite of implacable
facts of population and resources, and, like King Canute, he tries to
sweep back the tides of history, to deny the realities of the twentieth
century. His great tragedy is that he wasn’t born in the time of Louis
XIV, when France was indeed the most populous and richest nation in
Europe.”

I saw de Gaulle as a twentieth-century Don Quixote, seeking to pre-
serve old forms and restore old patterns, always trying to push a modest-
sized nation into the front rank alongside superpowers organized on a
continent-wide basis — in total disregard of this century s requirements
of scope and scale. As Raymond Aron wrote in 1962 in Peace and War ,
the obsolescence of any one of the West European states, acting alone,
"assumes, in our period, the appearance of an irrevocable destiny. The
approximate proportonality between force and resources, between re-
sources and the number of men and the amount of raw materials, bet-
ween mobilizable force and power, does not permit any hope that the
leader’s genius or the people’s virtue might reverse the verdict of
number.” 6 That was a point de Gaulle never understood, or if he under-
stood, never conceded. His whole life was dedicated to prove that a
"leader’s genius,” when combined with "the people’s virtue,” could
somehow "reverse the verdict of number” — that he could somehow
make France a superpower in spite of itself.

The Parturition of Europe 97

Monnet never indulged in such whimsical fantasy; he was a twen-
tieth-century man, in contrast to de Gaulle, the brilliant anachronism
who disrupted Europe by undertaking a tour de force beyond the reach
of his extraordinary abilities. As a result, I wrote in 1968, “like King
Lear, the General must in the end be reduced to complaining to the
heavens rebelling self-destructively at the deaf neutrality of imper-
sonal forces. As Carlyle said of Napoleon, he ‘has words in him which
are like Austerlitz battles.’ ” 7

De Gaulle was a man who, on two occasions, fulfilled a historical
lequirement but was at other times a nuisance. He twice bound up the
wounds of a nation at war with itself: once in 1946 and again in the late
^os, when he resolved the corrosive problem of Algeria that was beyond
the competence of the Fourth Republic. He found a country with its eyes
cast down and restored its self-respect and confidence, and one cannot
diminish that achievement.

Yet, even in 1968, I observed that “while he has served France bril-
liantly during a time of troubles, he has been one of the destructive ele-
ments in the larger chemistry of the West. This is not only a personal
misfortune, for I am convinced that history will give him bad marks for
what he has done to Europe, but it is a tragedy for the European people.
It is a tragedy not only because of the breakage caused, but — what is
even more poignant — because of the opportunity missed; of all the post-
war leaders he has been the only one with the necessary authority to
head a Europe that desperately wanted his leadership.’’ 8

What did the General leave behind him? Not French supremacy in
Europe, for today France is progressively slipping behind Germany both
economically and politically. He left little in concrete form. The Consti-
tution of 1958 has, so far, given stability to France, yet de Gaulle tar-
nished that achievement in 1962 by amendments providing for the direct
election of a President and the popular referendum — a dubious engine
that could someday invite dictatorial abuse in a political sysem lacking
America s checks and balances. In addition, he instituted a practice of
periodic consultation between the leaders in Paris and Bonn that depends
largely on the motivation of individuals, has no institutional underpin-
ning, and is far weaker than it need be because it is bilateral and not
embodied in any European system. In essence, de Gaulle was a superb
actor, but, unlike architects, actors leave only legends and transient play-
bills— nothing permanent that affects the lives or sensibilities of future
generations. De Gaulle was the Henry Irving of his day.

Since Jean Monnet, in contrast, was a superlative architect, his place
in history will not prove evanescent. As a heritage, he has left institutions
that, though falling short of their original high purpose, still play a major
lole in Euiopean life. He was preeminently a modern man, who per-
ceived a major dilemma of our complex time— the discord between our
technology, on the one hand, with its rapid pace of advance and its

t )8 Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

requirements of scale and scope, and, on the other, our institutional
arrangements, so slow to change and so often parochial in character. Yet
I do not mean that Monnet was unaware or disdainful of the past.
Though admittedly no scholar, his insight told him that history was not
static, not the constant replaying of old themes, but a flow of events that,
if man is to survive, must be so channeled as to meet the needs of an
evolving age. He was, therefore, never tempted into de Gaulle’s error —
induced by an atavistic longing for a world that never was — of seeking
to recapture the past. As I wrote some years ago in an introduction to
the American edition of Monnet’s memoirs,

It is because Jean Monnet so clearly perceives the nature of the great tidal lorces
now at work that he is sturdily immune to disappointments. I was with him on
more than one occasion when the progress of a new design seemed irrevocably
halted by the abrupt intrusion of obsolete — yet fiercely held — ideas that echoed
a distant and earlier age. Invariably — and sometimes almost alone— Jean Mon-
net remained undismayed. “What has happened, has happened," he would say
with a Gallic shrug, “but it does not affect anything fundamental. The important
point is for us not to be deflected, not to lose momentum. We must find a way
to go forward.”

It is because of his apparent imperturbability that Monnet is known— to the
admiration of his friends and the exasperation of his opponents— as an incorri-
gible optimist. Yet his optimism does not stem from any Panglossian idea that all
is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, but rather from a belief in the
logic of events and the essential rationality of man — a dauntless faith in the in-
eluctable direction of deeply moving forces. Optimism to Jean Monnet is the
only serviceable hypothesis for a practical man or woman with a passionate desire
to get things done.

Since the beginning of time many men have tried to alter the structure of
world power. When their ambitions have been selfish and hegemonic, they have
usually failed. When they have sought to realize their dreams by force, whatever
success they have achieved has been transient and illusory. But there have also
been those rare men whose visions were ample and generous, whose goal was no
less than the good of mankind, and who have relied not on force but on pei sua-
sion — the energy latent in an indomitable idea— to accomplish their objectives.
Sometimes those men have wrought miracles . 9

Requiem for an Inspired Friend

In March 1979, 1 flew to France for Jean Monnet’s funeral service in
a country church near Montfort 1 Amaury not far from Houjarray. It
was a bright, spring day, with that special quality of soft light (a speci-
ality de la France”) suffusing the lush countryside and inevitably recall-
ing our many walks together across the surrounding hills. The church
was filled with an oddly assorted congregation— not merely the simple
Frenchmen who were Jean’s neighbors but also the luminaries of Eui ope.
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, President Giscard d’Estaing, and foreign

A Washington Lawyer 99

ministers or heads of state from other European nations. Conspicuously
absent was anyone of comparable high standing from Britain.

Suddenly loudspeakers around the church began to blast forth with
an American chorus singing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” through
all five verses. John J. McCloy and a few other of Monnet’s close Amer-
ican friends smiled quietly on hearing that fighting song of the Ameri-
can Civil War — a song, as some of us knew, Jean had loved. It was the
kind of small joke he would certainly have enjoyed, and he would have
been amused at the blank looks of mystification on the faces of the
European dignitaries.

The service was a traditional French Catholic service, ceremonious
and elaborate. But easily identified on the program was one musical
composition of French origin, another of German, another of Italian,
and another of English. I he spirit of Monnet’s Europe was about him
even at his death.

After the sermon, Jack McCloy and I stopped a moment to speak to
Sylvia Monnet. As she and I embraced, she said to me, “George, did you
hear it, the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’? Wasn’t that wonderful?” “Yes,”
I replied. “It was all wonderful — all those years were wonderful.”

8. A Washington Lawyer

Both Ruth and I liked Washington. We could visit friends
without the need for time-consuming journeys, and people with varied
backgrounds were continually drifting through from the far corners of
the world to keep us intellectually alive. At the time, Washington had
few cultural amenities. Not until two decades later would the Kennedy
Center, under that brilliant impresario Roger L. Stevens, provide a cul-
tural dimension to a society shaped by politics. Unlike present-day
Washington, the gastronomic possibilities were then limited to two or
three mediocre restaurants and some embassies better known for their
chefs than their diplomatic significance. Yet we knew enough people in
government, the press, and the diplomatic corps to enjoy a constantly
replenished smorgasbord of ideas.

The Lippmanns

Soon after I returned from Europe in 1945, we bought a house on
Woodley Road, directly across from the Washington Cathedral, and a
week later discovered that Walter and Helen Lippmann lived on the
same block. Though we had met the Lippmanns casually on a number

ioo Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

of occasions, the new propinquity ripened and enriched our friendship,
and during the next twenty-two years, Walter and I met at least once
almost every fortnight. Either the four of us dined together at the
Lippmanns’ or, less often, at our house, or Walter and I would have
lunch or exchange late afternoon visits. It was more than a mere neigh-
borly friendship; I sought out Walter to clarify my own muddled think-
ing, while he used me as a kind of practice dartboard against which he
could throw ideas for his columns. Often I would agree with his views,
sometimes adding a qualification or an illustrative footnote; on other
occasions, I would reject his underlying theses and precipitate an argu-
ment. But, however useful he may have found the exercise, I was the
greater beneficiary.

For a man with so much to say, Walter was invariably a good listener,
tolerant of disagreement, and eager for fresh insights — though impa-
tient of what he deemed patent nonsense. Occasionally I would bring
someone to lunch whom I thought Walter might like to meet, but it was
not always a complete success. On one occasion, speaking of a man with
an inventive but undisciplined mind, he said to me, “Please don’t bring
‘X’ to lunch anymore. He has a flair for eccentric ideas that sound bril-
liantly plausible, but I can’t afford to spend the next week discovering
the missing element or the hidden flaw.”

Guests at the Lippmanns’ dinners were a mixed lot but usually stim-
ulating, and talk over the brandy often introduced me to fresh ideas and
diverse points of view. When the four of us dined alone, the conversa-
tion would sometimes drift off into gossip, personalities, and satirical
comments; Walter had a quiet but acerbic sense of humor, with an
underlying taste for gentle malice — while Helen’s malice was not always
so gentle. At the end of such an evening, Walter might say gleefully,
“Well, we’ve certainly been outrageous tonight, haven’t we?”

I remember particularly those occasions when I would goad him into
talking about earlier times, particularly his Harvard years with George
Santayana, William James, and his classmates of the celebrated class of
1910. At other times, I would ask him to reminisce about his Greenwich
Village experiences with Mabel Dodge and the young bohemians of the
early 1920s. He spoke with particular af f ection of John Reed, who was
later to write Ten Days That Shook the World and be buried within the walls
of the Kremlin. Had Reed lived, Walter insisted, he would have out-
grown his Communist enthusiasms; he was “far too intelligent not to
gain wisdom as events unfolded.” His appraisal of T. S. Eliot was less
charitable. “Tom was simply too highbrow for me,” he said. “Half the
time I didn’t know what he was talking about and I’m sure he didn’t
either.” I remember one glorious evening when Max Eastman dined with
the four of us. At my prodding, he and Walter provided a night of sus-
tained nostalgia.

A Washington Lawyer ioi

Establishing a Law Practice

Our law firm had taken form through a succession of accidents. Dur-
ing my interludes in America, while a member of the Bombing Survey,
1 had talked with Fowler Hamilton about establishing a practice in Wash-
ington. Hamilton had long planned to form a new law firm with a friend
named Hugh Cox, whom he had come to know when both were Rhodes
Scholars at Oxford and with whom he had later worked in the Depart-
ment of Justice. Though at the time I knew Cox largely by reputation,
he agreed that I should become the third member — a result, I knew, of
Hamilton’s gifted and generous advocacy. Growing up in Nebraska, Cox
had made an exceptional record at Oxford. As Assistant Solicitor Gen-
eral in the Department of Justice, he was widely known as a lawyer’s
lawyer, and his fame had begun to spread throughout professional and
business circles. At the time of his death in 1968, a library room in Christ
Church College, Oxford, was furnished in his honor and a memorial
volume issued with glowing tributes from luminaries of the bar.

In the fall of 1945, our plans for a modest Washington office were
drastically revised when four partners of the firm of Root, Clark, Buck-
ner and Ballantine in New York — George Cleary, Leo Gottlieb, Henry
Friendly, and Melvin Steen — decided to break away and establish a firm
of their own. A third party, friendly both to Cox and the New York
group, proposed a merging of efforts, but since I had only casually met
one member of the New York group, Leo Gottlieb, I was not a part of
the discussions. I was, in fact, about to accept an offer to become a Wash-
ington partner of the Root, Clark firm when the secessionists asked me
to join them. My new partners were all men of extraordinary ability, and
the new firm (which is today known as Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Ham-
ilton) grew rapidly from our original seven to where it now consists of
more than two hundred lawyers with offices not only in New York and
Washington but also in Paris, Brussels, London, and Hong Kong.

My work with Leon Blum delayed my entry into the firm for six
months, so that I did not join until July 1, 1946. Shortly thereafter, my
practice was interrupted while surgeons removed my right kidney and
successfully halted the cancer that had attacked it. I have rarely thought
about it since.

We soon found ourselves gratifyingly busy. My partners were more
gifted than I in attracting clients, but I represented various agencies of
the French government and, in time, began to counsel other foreign
interests, both public and private. On my initiative, our firm opened an
office in Paris in 1949; both it and the Brussels office which I later pro-
posed have now grown to impressive dimensions.

In 1951, while Europe was still pulling itself together after the war,

I was asked to advise the leaders of the French Patronat — an industrial

102 Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

federation that includes the whole of French industry. They needed
someone to help prepare the European Patronat for a meeting in New
York with the United States National Association of Manufacturers. I
was surprised that they selected me as their adviser since they opposed
most of the objectives for which I was working (the Schuman Plan and
other measures for uniting Europe), but I was happy to have them as a
client. My wife and I joined the Patronat delegates in Paris, then crossed
with most of them on the Liber te, where I gave a daily lecture, preparing
my pupils for their encounter with the American natives. I enjoyed the
experience for I could and did brainwash my captive audience with my
own idiosyncratic interpretation of everything from the American
approach to income taxes and antitrust measures to the prevailing
American opinion of France and particularly its colonial policies. Many
of the businessmen had not been to America since before the war; for
others, it was a first visit. The inclusion of German industrialists in the
Patronat delegation created awkward moments, since it was only six years
after the war, but the presence of an American proved a leavening
ingredient.

Thereafter, for several years, I met regularly with French business
leaders in Paris for meetings of the “Comite Ball," during which I tried
to keep them informed of current American thought, policy, and action.
In addition, I wrote long papers covering economic and political subjects
that I thought might be of interest. Not only did they have an avid inter-
est in news of America, they were also concerned that the problems and
achievements of French industry were not understood in the United
States. So, at their urging, I established a regular monthly newsletter
called France Actuelle , designed to inform Americans of French activities
primarily in technology and industry. France Actuelle continued publica-
tion until 1972, building an established readership and providing a model
for other foreign industrial and governmental publications.

I look back wistfully on those postwar years. Part of almost every
month was spent in Europe, while my partners and I — particularly Fow-
ler Hamilton — sought every opportunity to enlarge the scope and rep-
utation of our firm. Law practice was for me both a source of income
and a base of operations from which I could engage in a melange of
activities on the edge of politics and diplomacy. I valued the discipline
acquired from work in a firm of rigorous professional standards and I
found the law full of intellectual challenges, but, unlike some lawyers, I
did not find it all-absorbing. Too many other things interested me as
much or even more. So I was not surprised to overhear one of my
younger colleagues explaining what he regarded as a critical flaw in my
character. “Ball is," he said, “an unmatched frontalier but a man without
a country."

A Washington Lawyer 103

Liberalizing Trade

Reflecting the lessons I had learned from my Lend-Lease experience
and my later work with Monnet, I felt it essential that we rid the world
economy of its encrusted barnacles of trade and monetary restrictions.
Though Bretton Woods had provided an essential step toward monetary
sanity, the movement of goods and services was still badly hobbled. As a
great trading nation, we had heavy past sins to expiate. Our mindless
protectionism of the late twenties and early thirties had helped to precip-
itate the world’s economic collapse and to create the conditions that fos-
tered the rise of Hitler — at the same time that our isolationism (the other
face of protectionism) had induced us to stand numbly by while the world
slid toward catastrophic war.

As an ardent advocate of liberal trade, I tried to fit my professional
activities to my convictions. Beginning in April 1950, I represented the
Venezuelan Central Bank and Chamber of Commerce in a counter-
offensive against efforts of domestic oil operators to limit oil imports,
and, in 1955, I helped the Cuban sugar industry secure adequate quotas
for its product in the highly restricted United States market. I have never
liked lobbying and am bored and uncomfortable when I have to impor-
tune Senators and Congressmen, even for causes in which I firmly believe.
But in acting for the Venezuelans and Cubans I spent little time wan-
dering about the Senate and House of fice buildings. Instead, we concen-
trated on showing American industrial and commercial companies how
much they depended on their exports to Venezuela and Cuba. In devel-
oping the means of identifying the interested American companies — a
complex task — we were perhaps the first to use computer technology in
a major lobbying effort.

During the years that 1 assisted these two foreign interests, we man-
aged to frustrate the protectionist lobbies, but our representation in each
case was terminated through unexpected events. On June 24, 1953, the
Presidents brother, Dr. Milton Eisenhower, paid a goodwill visit to
Caracas; while there, he assured the Venezuelan dictator, Perez Jime-
nez, that President Eisenhower fully supported the free entry of Vene-
zuelan oil into the United States. That was sufficient assurance for the
dictator, who observed that if his own brother were to make such a firm
statement, that would settle the matter. So he accepted Milton Eisen-
hower’s word at face value and fired his Washington lawyers. A few weeks
later, he was taught a lesson in American democracy: under Congres-
sional pressure, the President imposed tight quotas on oil imports.

The termination of our Cuban representation involved a more dra-
matic event — the takeover of the Cuban government by Fidel Castro.

My enthusiasm for liberal trading policies led me early in 1953 to
help create an organization to resist protectionist sentiment. The prime

104 Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

movers were businessmen of conviction and proven achievement,
including John S. Coleman, president of Burroughs Corporation and
the Detroit Board of Commerce; Harry Bullis, chairman of General Mills;
John J. McCloy, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank; and Joseph
Spang, Jr., president of the Gillette Company. After a series of meetings
in New York and Washington, we established the Committee for a
National Trade Policy. I served as a member of the Executive Commit-
tee and Board of Directors and as secretary of the Committee.

The Bilderberg Group

Creating the Committee was not of major importance; like most high-
minded committees, it ran out of steam in a few years and, for all I know,
has long since expired. But I mention it because it led me to involvement
in a wholly different enterprise — the Bilderberg Group. That enterprise
started as a gleam in the eye of Dr. Joseph H. Retinger, a character who
could have stepped out of one of Somerset Maugham’s more flamboyant
works. A political adventurer in the pattern of a Casanova, Cellini, or
Tom Paine, he simply did not think or act the way others did; he was
brave and adventurous to the point of being impetuous, romantic, and
sometimes just plain foolhardy.

As a student in France at the age of twenty, the Polish-born Retinger
made f riends among leading Paris literati, including Andre Gide. Shortly
before the First World War, he established a Polish bureau in London,
where he became a close friend of another Pole, Joseph Conrad. Moving
brashly in high circles in Paris after the war, he made powerful enemies
and was expelled. From Spain, he made his way to Mexico, where he
ingratiated himself with the political opposition and some years later
acted as Plutarco Calles’s adviser in expropriating the Mexican oil prop-
erties of American companies. With the beginning of the Second World
War, he allied himself with General Wladyslaw Sikorski, who was Prime
Minister of the Polish government in exile, and worked with Sikorski to
negotiate an agreement with the Soviet Union that he hoped might free
thousands of Poles from Russian domination. That again made him
enemies — this time, among Poles who thought any compromise with the
Soviets was treason.

After Sikorski’s death in July 1943, Retinger arranged to be para-
chuted into Poland in order to make contact with the Polish under-
ground, brief them on what was happening in London, and reassure
them of Allied support. Though Retinger was fifty-seven, in poor health,
and with no training in underground activities, he made the drop and
worked in Poland with the underground from April 3 to July 26, 1944.
In June he suffered an attack of polyneuritis that deprived him of the
use of both feet and hands. For weeks, the underground hid him in a

A Washington Lawyer ioy

private clinic; then, in spite of his paralysis, he was secretly taken out of
Poland by a light British plane sent from Bari, Italy, to collect him.

No longer useful to Poland, he turned his efforts to improving rela-
tions between Europe and the United States, approaching former Bel-
gian Prime Minister Paul van Zeeland, Paul Rykens, chairman of the
board of Unilever, and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. To check
the deterioration of transatlantic relations, they should, he urged, take
the lead in organizing unofficial private meetings between leaders on the
two sides of the Atlantic. The Prince organized a small committee on the
European side; then in 1953, proposed a corresponding American com-
mittee to General Walter Bedell Smith, a fishing companion who had
been Eisenhower’s chief of staff. Smith, in turn, referred the matter to
C. D. Jackson, a vice-president of Time-Life who was then a White House
special assistant. Knowing of our Committee for a National Trade Pol-
icy, Jackson passed the responsibility for organizing an American com-
mittee to John Coleman, who asked me to work with him since it involved
problems outside his experience.

Early in 1954, Coleman and I attended a meeting in Paris at the
modest apartment of Joseph Retinger’s assistant, John Pomian. On
entering the room, we found not only Prince Bernhard but also Guy
Mollet, former Socialist Prime Minister of the Fourth Republic, and
Antoine Pinay, a conservative ex-Prime-Minister — two men who, I
thought, would rarely be seen together at a private conference.

As a result of this and later meetings, plans were made for our first
session to be held at the Hotel Bilderberg at Oosterbeek, Holland. It was
an old-fashioned summer hotel in a wooded park, and, concerned for
the security of so many famous guests, the government had established
a plainclothes guard behind every tree. Amused by such highly visible
precautions, I told the Prince on the second day that I was going stir
crazy; we then speculated on the chances of my getting out of the hotel
and to the main road without getting shot.

Thereafter, for twenty-seven years, our group met at least once a
year at a quiet retreat (usually a tourist hotel off season) for two and a
half days of serious discussion. In addition, there were smaller meetings
of the Steering Committee, held until recently at Soestdijk Palace, Prince
Bernhard s country home. Except during my years in the government,

I was a member of the Steering Committee from the formation of the
group until 1979. I hen the Bilderberg founders turned it over to a
younger group, although I remain an adviser. I have attended every
Bilderberg meeting with one exception.

The Bilderberg meetings primarily concentrate on a single objective:
t° tr y to clear up abrasive problems and attitudes that could poison
effective relations between America and Europe. The meetings are
attended by the members of a permanent steering committee of Euro-

106 Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

peans and Americans and by other men and women of achievement and
competence specially invited on each occasion. Attendance is limited to
roughly eighty persons. Candor is assured by ground rules that forbid
anyone to discuss the meetings except in the most general way or, in
outside conversation, to attribute expressed views to any individual. At
each meeting, there is a political and an economic problem to which the
discussion is addressed. All views are taken as individual expressions; no
one speaks for his government, his political party, or any other organi-
zation.

The real distinction of Bilderberg is not, however, its ground rules
but the extraordinary quality of those who attend the meetings. 1 here
is hardly a major political figure from Europe or the United States who
has not been invited at least once. Of the present or recent heads of
government, Helmut Schmidt, the German Chancellor, has attended
several times, and among others who have come one or more times have
been Valery Giscard d’Estaing, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Edward
Heath, Margaret Thatcher, Rene Pleven, Guy Mollet, Pierre Mendes-
France, as well as Prince Philip, Denis Healey, Dean Rusk, Dean Ache-
son, Henry Kissinger, and Cyrus Vance.

While the meetings bring together men of strong and differing per-
sonal views, they also disclose the national characteristics of the nations
represented. At hrst, those on the American side seemed hesitant to say
anything critical of their own government or to depart from a general
American policy line. Reflecting a different tradition and political sys-
tem, the British were bound by no such inhibitions, and a highlight of
the early meetings was a continuing pyrotechnical debate between Hugh
Gaitskell and Robert (now Lord) Boothby that reflected the intense ide-
ological polarization separating the Labour and Conservative parties.

Bilderberg’s most valuable achievement has been to provide for the
development of easy relations between individuals of disparate back-
grounds, eating, drinking, walking— and constantly talking — together
in isolated settings. When I joined the State Department in 1961, I was
already well acquainted with most Western leaders. Some I knew partic-
ularly well, since we had been together at Bilderberg on more than one
occasion. I was sensitive to their attitudes and prejudices, while they
understood America much better because of exposure to articulate
Americans.

The McCarthy Era and Henry Wallace

Though over the years I usually found Washington attractive, I found
it quite unpleasant throughout that sordid period when Joseph McCar-
thy was throwing his venomous tantrums and when Americans, caught
up in a pervasive hysteria, viewed their friends and neighbors with mor-

A Washington Lawyer ioy

bid suspicion. During my tours in the government both in the early New
Deal days and during the war, I had known many of the familiar names
in the McCarthy lexicon of abuse — Alger Hiss, Harry White, Lauchlin
Currie, and Frank Coe — but my skepticism and aversion to joining col-
lective enterprises had saved me from any personal connection with
ambiguous front organizations. Still, that did not prevent others, less
lucky but equally blameless, from being caught up in the national parox-
ysm of fear and hatred.

Working with me in my law firm during much of this time were two
remarkable young lawyers: Leon Lipson and Adam Yarmolinsky. From
*95° to *954 they threw themselves wholeheartedly into the struggle to
protect unjustly accused men and women from suffering the traditional
fate of innocent bystanders in a town overrun by bandits. Though both
Lipson and Yarmolinsky had experienced the intellectual ferment of the
immediate postwar years, they had impeccable anti-Communist records
and formed a remarkably effective team. Lipson, now a professor at the
Yale Law School and a respected expert on Soviet law, displayed
extraordinary erudition, diligence, integrity, and generosity as well as a
detached view of life. Yarmolinsky, flamboyant, bright, enthusiastic, and
equally energetic, found it harder to separate the desirable from the
unfeasible or to recognize the trade-offs effectiveness often requires.

Once satisfied that an accused had not engaged in any activities dam-
aging to America, they successfully set out to establish his loyalty and
security. They took many cases, doing their preparatory work largely on
nights and weekends. Since precise charges were never disclosed, an
accused and his counsel carried an excessive burden of defense; it was
necessary to search for dues over the entire life span of the accused and
to account for all of his activities during his mature, and sometimes his
immature, years.

As head of our Washington office, my principal contribution was to
keep the way clear for Yarmolinsky and Lipson to run their own legal-
aid bureau, though in at least one situation I did play a central role. On
October 6, 1951, Joseph Alsop, the newspaper columnist, called to tell
me that Henry Wallace had been summoned to testify before the McCar-
ran Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee (the Subcommit-
tee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and
Other Internal Security Laws). I he Committee’s inquiry was directed
primarily at a trip Wallace had taken, at President Roosevelt’s request,
to Mongolia and Siberia in 1944, where he had been accompanied by
such expert advisers as Owen Lattimore and John Carter Vincent, both
of whom were in 1951 being accused— quite unjustly— of Communist
sympathies. Alsop had met the group in Kunming and had gone along
for part of the trip.

1 hough Alsop had no sympathy for Wallace, he was outraged that

108 Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

McCarran was rewriting history so grotesquely. He therefore insisted on
testifying himself, though he recognized that it would expose him to
considerable risk since his acerbic pen had made him many enemies. He
was deeply concerned for Wallace, who, unless represented by an expe-
rienced lawyer, would, Alsop said, “be slaughtered.” Neither my part-
ners nor I were anxious to get mixed up in Wallace’s affairs, since we
thought him a naive and muddled man, and normally, I would have
refused to represent an individual touched by so much folly. But when
Alsop claimed to have tried and been turned down by “every competent
lawyer in town,” his defense became irresistibly attractive to me; no mat-
ter how foolish Wallace may have been, he was entitled to counsel.

Wallace’s trip to Mongolia and Siberia had been a curious enterprise.
On the advice of Lauchlin Currie (who was later attacked for Commu-
nist sympathies), he had taken Owen Lattimore. He had also wanted to
take Colonel Philip Faymenville, who had handled Lend-Lease matters
in the Soviet Union, but General Marshall vetoed the proposal with the
edict that “Faymenville was a representative of the Russians, not of the
United States”; the FBI, he said, had a large file on Faymenville . 1 But
Wallace did take along a memorandum from Alger Hiss, which he
described as “excellent .” 2

Roosevelt’s concept of the trip was that Vice-President Wallace, “as
an agricultural expert, should observe the ways of life in Siberia, Outer
Mongolia and China, and reach some conclusions about how to mini-
mize sources of conflict between China and the Soviet Union.” He was
also to urge “Chiang Kai-shek to arrange a modus operandi with the
Chinese Communists” that would assure a more vigorous pursuit of “the
war against Japan, and to take steps to control inflation in China .” 3

In spite of my initial hesitation about representing Wallace, I liked
the man. I found him modest, compassionate, and gentle, but the obstin-
acy of his idealism so impelled him to reject all troubling realities that he
seemed quite incapable of comprehending his own predicament. He had
drafted a statement he proposed to make to the Committee that con-
sisted largely of a frontal attack, calling the Committee members “face-
less men” and impugning their motives. His description of his trip to
Mongolia and Siberia and his proposed comments on the Russians would,
in the climate of the time, have been a disaster.

Even after seven years, Wallace seemed only partly aware of what
had happened to him. President Roosevelt had carefully timed Wallace’s
trip — from early May to the second week in July — to bring him back to
the United States only nine days before the Democratic Convention.
There he found, presumably to his astonishment, that Roosevelt was
dropping him as his Vice-Presidential candidate in favor of Harry Tru-
man. When the President had first proposed the trip, Wallace had, so he
told me, replied that he would go only if it served a serious purpose, to

A Washington Lawyer 109

which, as he recounted it, the President had replied, “Oh, it will be very
useful. I think you ought to see a lot of Siberia.” When Wallace told me
this in his solemn, trusting fashion, I found it easy to imagine Roosevelt’s
glee after Wallace had left the room. Did he, as I can imagine it, report
to his close confidants: “I’ve just sent Henry to Siberia and told him to
stay there a long time and — the poor dope — he doesn’t know what’s hap-
pening to him?”

In preparing for the Committee hearing, Wallace and I had a long
and, I regret, often acrimonious struggle, during which I threatened
several times to quit. Finally, I persuaded him to accept my draft state-
ment: a straightforward account of his trip and a factual refutation of
the charges made against him. I subjected him to long hours of interro-
gation — “horseshedding,” as lawyers call it — to keep him from blunder-
ing onto dangerous terrain.

Alsop led off before the Committee with his own statement, coun-
tering aggressive questions with courage and bravura. The room was
filled with fanatical McCarthyites, principally old women exuding venom
and muttering virulent curses. They were, I thought, spiritual
descendants of Madame La Farge and those other scabrous crones who
watched the tumbrels roll by. Wallace then followed, stumbling through
his testimony without too much breakage, and I was relieved that the
long hours of coaching had paid off.

The “ Channel ” Project

My law practice was made not merely tolerable but stimulating by
unusual and sometimes bizarre projects that occasionally came my way.
Many — in fact, most — were not worth pursuing (at least not worth it to
me), and I sent the potential clients elsewhere, but one matter that stirred
my imagination was the project for a tunnel under the English Chan-
ne ^ the Chunnel, as it came to be called — which had been periodically
proposed ever since 1802.

What had revived that ancient project once again was the mat de mer
of two French sisters in 1956. The girls, members of a branch of the
wealthy Schlumberger family, then living in New York, were on a holi-
day in France with their young husbands, Frank Davidson, an American
lawyer, and Arnaud de Vitry, a Frenchman with an engineering back-
ground who had attended the Harvard Business School. Lamenting their
uneasy crossing, one of the wives ruefully remarked that the two hus-
bands should build a Channel tunnel. Reacting to this obvious logic, they
founded a company called Technical Studies, which retained me as an
adviser. I left for Europe on June 9, 1956* to assist in the jockeying for
position then under way.

As a result of much maneuvering, a combined company was finally

iio Monnet, Europe, and Law Practice

formed, to be owned by a French group comprising the French Railways
and the French Rothschild interests, the British Channel Tunnel Com-
pany, and Technical Studies. It established a study group with a steering
committee consisting of three representatives each for the three large
holders and one representative for Technical Studies. I normally played
that role. The Steering Committee was confronted with complex tech-
nical and financial problems. Because of ventilation requirements, an
automobile tunnel was ruled out as uneconomic. More feasible was a
railroad tunnel with facilities for rapidly loading automobiles on flatbed
carriages. Should the tunnel be built by boring or by use of submerged
tubes? Would not a bridge be more feasible, or, perhaps, a hybrid — half-
bridge, half-tunnel? Several great engineering firms made tentative pro-
posals, each trying to demonstrate the advantages of its own method.

Though I thought the logic of the tunnel compelling — particularly
after the United Kingdom joined the Common Market — British oppo-
sition proved formidable. In a modern world of nuclear bombing, guided
missiles, and supersonic planes, nothing seemed sillier than the
announcement of Field Marshal Lord Montgomery on Trafalgar Day,
1957, that he opposed the tunnel because “strategically, it would weaken
us.” “Why give up one of our greatest assets, our island home,” he asked
rhetorically, “and make things easier for our enemies?” A newspaper
cartoon in London promptly showed Napoleon’s legions fiercely emerg-
ing from the British end of the tunnel accoutered with menacing muskets
and the banners of Austerlitz.

When I entered the government in 1961, I lost track of the day-to-
day maneuvering on the tunnel. Although many people now believe that
the tunnel has become obsolete, I am confident that it will, sooner or
later, be built, simply because the logic is so compelling. With Britain a
member of the European Economic Community, it cannot afford to hold
aloof from the Continent. But the tunnel will be built only when enough
Englishmen grow tired of waiting for a quieter sea for the Hovercraft,
or for the fog to clear so the planes can fly, or for French air controllers
to cease sadistically venting their grievances by grounding the airlines.
Then — but only then — will governments recognize the stupidity of
resisting a land link. I hope to be on the first train to emerge at Sangatte.

PART IV

Adlai Stevenson and

Politics

9 . Stevenson

I saw little of Adlai Stevenson between December 1944, when
we parted in Europe, and the early 1950s, but I heard that he had finally
decided to run for Governor of Illinois. I hough I sent Adlai a campaign
contribution, I did not take his chances seriously. He was, as I saw it,
quite unsuited to rough and tumble Illinois politics— but he could only
find that out by trying. Thus I thought of his campaign as a therapeutic
exercise to purge him of political fantasies.

Stevenson’s talents were, I then thought, more social than political,
and I did not then recognize how effectively his social charm could be
converted into political charisma. In a small group he emanated warmth
and bubbling humor. He paid attention to human beings and would
listen patiently and sympathetically to their ills and complaints. Though
patrician in his view of society, he treated everyone — whether a taxi
driver, bus boy, or head of state — with bantering courtesy, and he was a
master of the small endearing gesture. Once, when Ruth was standing
next to him dui ing a campaign, someone handed him an ice cream cone.
Immediately he sought out a small boy in the crowd, saying, “Look at
my contours, you need this worse than I.”

Even when depressed or upset about some incident, Adlai would
express his discontent with a throwaway line or a comic aside that dis-
paraged either himself or some friend or acquaintance who had annoyed
01 disappointed him. YV hen tired or disconsolate he could on occasion
be snide about even good friends but he did not mean it; he was not
vindictive, and his moods changed quickly.

For me, his greatest charm was his tolerant view of the world as
essentially a comic theater, and he displayed a cynical irreverence. Once,
when we were practicing law together, he went to New York to meet

1 12 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

with a group of investment bankers. “Though it was a bitterly cold day,”
he reported later, “greed ran down their faces like sweat." Despite his
engaging cynicism, he could speak in eloquent — often slightly purple —
terms of the world predicament, the dangers of a nuclear disaster, and
particularly the plight of poor people in the poor nations (though I
sometimes thought his elegantly expressed sympathy rather an abstrac-
tion). He certainly liked the amenities of life — good food, pleasant sur-
roundings, and, most of all, literate conversation. The last was particularly
important to him, since, so far as I could see, he read few books and
shaped his opinions largely from the comments and suggestions of men
and women he respected. At a time when letter writing had become
almost a lost art, Adlai constantly used it as a form of conversation.

He was at his best as host in his Libertyville home, which he loved. A
comfortable but not elaborate house, it occupied a few acres northwest
of Chicago — or, more accurately, southwest of Libertyville, the haven of
Chicago’s rich. He had the normal equipment of any good farmer of the
area: a tennis court, a swimming pool, a horse or two, and a few sheep.
His land was totally flat— as was true of the whole region, where a ten-
foot elevation was regarded as a hill. Before he became Governor, he
and his wife, Ellen, lived a highly social life; she was vivacious and pretty
in a pixyish way and at parties was more the center of attention than he.
But once Stevenson was Governor and the spotlight shifted to him, she
proved quite unwilling to play a supporting role. She refused to leave
her circle of like-minded friends for what she apparently regarded as
the parochial society of Springfield, Illinois, and became not only embit-
tered but, ultimately, psychotic. Upon Adlai’s election, she lapsed into a
kind of deliberately obtrusive slatternliness, to the point that, when she
and Adlai came to Washington for Eisenhower’s inauguration, Ruth and
I were shocked by the remarkable change in her appearance and
demeanor. She was overweight, dismayingly unkempt, and seemed to
flaunt her ineffable boredom and discontent.

I had approached election night in 1948 with distaste and apprehen-
sion. The omens were not good for Democrats. Dewey was, I thought,
both arrogant and petty, but, though I did not like him, he seemed des-
tined to win: 1 did not doubt the experts who — even more wrong than
usual — predicted that a Dewey landslide would sweep away Democratic
candidates all across the nation. On election night, 1 dined with business
acquaintances in New York, sitting up till midnight to listen to the returns.
Truman was running better than we expected, but I did not think his
chances serious and 1 went to bed believing that Dewey would be Presi-
dent. The one bright surprise of the evening was a radio report that
Stevenson had won in Illinois.

Stevenson 113

Adlai Plays Hamlet

During the next three years, I saw Adlai only once or twice, although
we exchanged an occasional message. On December 11, 1951, I wrote
him to apologize for having missed him during his last two visits because
I was continuing to “lead the life of an overseas commuter.”

Thus, I was not prepared for a visit early in January 1952 from Mrs.
Violet Gunther, the political secretary of the Americans for Democratic
Action. Did I think that Stevenson would be available to run for Presi-
dent? I told her I had never discussed the question with him, but he was
clearly well qualified. There followed a visit with James Loeb, Jr., an
assistant to the White House Special Counsel, and a later talk with David
Lloyd, also an assistant to the Special Counsel. I had worked with Lloyd
during the war and he had traveled with Stevenson during a postwar
trip to Italy for the Foreign Economic Administration to survey emer-
gency economic and reconstruction needs.

Lloyd and Loeb were, they said, approaching me with the knowledge
of Charles Murphy, then Special Counsel to the President, but without
specific Presidential authorization. I do not recall how often we met after
that, but I was soon told that President Truman wanted to talk with
Stevenson — would I arrange a visit to Washington?

I found Adlai stonily resistant. He had just announced his candidacy
for a second term as Governor of Illinois. What did I think he was — “the
garden variety of opportunistic pol who charged off looking for a better
pasture whenever he heard a distant bell”? During his first four years,
he had, he said, started many projects and he intended to finish them;
to walk out now would be “bad faith” to his supporters. There was much
more of the same — scornful rejection poured out in exasperated phrases.
But I had no intention of letting him off easily, and we talked on and
on. Several further conversations followed before he grumpily conceded
that he could not ignore a “command from Buckingham Palace” and,
besides, he did have some official business in Washington. After the
Centralia Mine disaster in 1947, he had taken a lead in seeking improved
mine safety legislation and now he needed to discuss the question with
Sect etary of the Interior Oscar Chapman and John L. Lewis, the formi-
dable head of the United Mine Workers. Truman had made clear, I told
him, that he would be offended if a Democratic governor came to Wash-
ington without calling on him.

On Tuesday morning, January 22, Stevenson was to fly to Washing-
ton without announcing his destination and meet with John L. Lewis.
He would then come to my home, and, after dinner, I would take him
to Blair House, where President Truman was living during the renova-
tion of the White House. Stevenson was late for dinner, and, just before

1 14 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

he arrived, Carleton Kent, of the Chicago S un-Times’ s Washington bureau,
called me. He knew Adlai would be dining with me that night and wanted
him to return the call. When Adlai finally arrived, breathless and com-
plaining, he was upset at the message from Kent. "Why can t I do any-
thing without some damn fool leaking it?” “You’re lucky, I replied, that
the whole world doesn’t know where you are, since your face is on the
cover of Time that hit the stands yesterday.”

During dinner, Adlai rehearsed the coming interview. How could he
explain to President Truman, without showing disrespect for the office
of the Presidency, that he wished to remain Governor of Illinois? How
could he make it clear to Truman that he was not going to run? To seek
the Presidency now would be to break faith with the people of Illinois.
He had been elected Governor by Republicans as well as Democrats and
he would not turn his back on his friends — referring principally to his
Lake Forest neighbors — who had worked hard for him.

Already Adlai was beginning to think of himself in the third person.
Stevenson the politician was bound by certain standards — ^noblesse oblige —
that ruled out the practices of the ordinary “pol.” Though pols fasci-
nated him (he often expressed amused admiration and affection for the
most cynical), he looked on them with aristocratic condescension.

I tried to get him to promise that if Truman asked him to run, he
would not flatly reject the idea. The United States was in a critical period.
Taft might well be the Republican nominee, and we desperately needed
a President with a broad view of the world who could carry on the grand
enterprises begun in the postwar years. I continued on this theme as I
drove him to Blair House but with a sinking feeling that 1 was losing the
struggle. When we reached the police barricades on Pennsylvania Ave-
nue, the Secret Service guard blocked the way. Who was this small, dumpy
man who arrived in my old Chevrolet? Only after telephoning back and
forth did they grudgingly open the barricade.

I told Ruth when I reached home that the interview then in progress
would prove disastrous. Truman — brusque and decisive — would never
understand Stevenson’s subtle rendition of Prince Hamlet. My predic-
tion seemed confirmed when Adlai called me the next morning to say
he had “made a hash” of the meeting but, in any event “had put a stop
to all the nonsense.” He had, he said, told the President “very bluntly”
that he did not wish to run. He knew Truman could not understand his
reluctance and would think he was afraid to take on a hard fight. At one
point, Truman had made a comment that 1 found particularly endear-
ing: “Adlai, if a knucklehead like me can be President and not do too
badly, think what a really educated smart guy like you could do in the
job.” Stevenson continued in a mood of lamentation. He repeated that
he had “made a hash” of the talk and that the President probably thought
him an idiot. Truman, he felt sure, had written him off as hopeless; the

Stevenson 1 15

only advantage was that the interview had definitely put an end to the
question of his Presidential candidacy.

But, as morning wore on, 1 found the issue far from closed. The
newspapers had got wind of the fact that Stevenson had seen the Presi-
dent and, with the coincidental appearance of the Time cover story, he
was clearly the man of the hour. Later that day, I lunched with Steven-
son, David Lloyd, and Jim Loeb. To my surprise, Adlai seemed much
less negative about his meeting with 1 ruman than he had reported to
me. He seemed genuinely interested in the possibility of running, asking
a number of questions about his prospects for the Presidency and the
electoral mechanics — the dates of the primaries and the amount of money
that would have to be raised.

Aftei Stevenson had left for Springfield, I remained in a quandary.
Did he want to be drafted? Could an honest draft ever occur? Was he
afraid of losing^ After all, he had remarked to me on the way to Blair
House, “I'll be damned if I want to be a caretaker for the party. If Eisen-
hower runs, nobody can beat him. And anyway, wouldn’t Eisenhower
make a pretty good President? There’s a hell of a lot of truth in the need
for a change.”

He was not arguing with me so much as with himself. My contribu-
tion to his inner debate was to point out our country’s unhappy past
experience with generals as Presidents. Stevenson’s background, on the
othei hand, was unparalleled; his Middle-Western origin gave him a
feeling for the country uncontaminated by the winds blowing from either
Europe or Asia. His international experience made him sensitive to those
winds and to the great forces then churning in the world. His experience
as a practicing lawyer had given him a feel for the private sector, and
during his tours in Washington he had gained an inside view of the
bureaucracy. He had run successfully for elected office and demon-
strated his administrative capacities as the Governor of one of our most
important states. What better qualifications could anyone have? How-
ever he felt about it, I told him, I was going to make him better known.
Rathei to my sui prise, he did not veto the idea but merely responded,
“Well, don’t make it appear I’m building myself up.”

I hat was the laissez-passer I needed to set up a “Stevenson informa-
tion center’ in my Washington office, known by the code name Project
Wintergreen, after the leading character in “Of Thee I Sing.” I raised
several thousand dollars and hired a young journalist, Libby Donahue,
and a public relations man, Allen Harris, to collect Stevenson material
and help feed it to the press. At a suggestion from Arthur Schlesinger,

I took my old friend Bernard De Voto with me to Springfield, where we
spent several days in the Governor’s mansion. De Voto’s next “Easy Chair”
column in Harpers was an eloquent piece entitled, “Stevenson and the
Independent Voter.” Allen Harris assembled an article for Look Maga-

7/6 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

zine and spent some time in Springfield. Together, Harris and Donahue
prepared a detailed brochure about Stevenson for national distribution.

1 wrote Stevenson to tell him about this and many other things on Feb-
ruary 20, asking him if he wanted me to desist.

The next day, Stevenson wrote that he had heard “some alarming
reports about the activities of Mr. Harris with various magazines in the
East” and that there was confusion among publishers “as to whether or
not he is my spokesman, and I hope you can restrain him. Still, since
he did not explicitly forbid my efforts, we went ahead full steam, though
1 wrote Stevenson that “to be on the safe side, 1 have put Harris in a
corner and covered him with a rug.” I enclosed the brochure we were
sending to editors of major friendly papers throughout the country,
adding that “if this whole idea appalls you, please let me know and I
shall behave accordingly.” Again Stevenson interposed no veto, merely
replying on February 27 that “I have your letter and have marked it well.

I am sorely troubled. My heart is here and my head is not far behind.
We will see.”

Meanwhile, I concentrated on trying to keep Stevenson from fore-
closing the future, telephoning whenever I heard a rumor that he was
about to issue a categorical renunciation. We haggled over the issue
interminably but with no new ideas or fresh phrasing on either side.
Whenever his resistance seemed to be hardening, I would get him to
promise to make no negative public statement until I could fly out to
Springfield, which I usually did the following day.

I was also keeping in touch with Charles Murphy and David Lloyd,
who reported to me that Truman was becoming increasingly impatient.
In my letter of February 20, I had advised Stevenson to arrange a secret
conversation with the President about mid-March, contending that he
owed Truman another talk. That meeting, which took place on March
4, proved even more negative than the previous one. Still, Stevenson
cooperated with my publicity build-up, sending me, on March 10, a large
file of family photographs. On March 14, Jim Loeb told me that the
President wanted Stevenson to have an in-depth talk with Charles Mur-
phy. I tracked Adlai down in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was plan-
ning to fly directly to Florida with his youngest son, John Fell, but, after
noisily complaining, agreed to travel by way of Washington. To avoid
publicity, he even bought an airline ticket under an assumed name. He
and his son spent the night at my house. Jim Loeb joined us for dinner,
after which my youngest son took John Fell to the movies while Charles
Murphy came by for a late talk.

It was a dismal evening. Stevenson was more obdurate than ever,
insisting that he did not want to run and even going out of his way to
attack Truman’s liberal policies, as though wishing not only to distance
himself from the President but also to compel Truman to write him off

Stevenson ny

on ideological grounds. He did not, he asserted, like the idea of public
housing. Nor did he favor repealing the Taft-Hartley Labor Law; he
wished merely to amend it. Were he President, he would hold firm on
stabilization issues; as a result, the country would be tied up with strikes.
He regarded education as a state, not a federal, problem; only if the
states failed to act adequately should the federal government lend help.
He was opposed to “socialized medicine’’ and the Brannan Plan for
agriculture. He thought the states should be responsible for their own
civil rights policies and that the federal government ought not to “put
the South completely over a barrel. ’’ The national debt was appalling;
he was an apostle of economy. Reflecting on what he later called the
“mess in Washington,” he stated vehemently that wrongdoers should not
only be fired from the government but also prosecuted. Only on the
issue of foreign policy did he seem to approve of what Truman was
doing. Yet he did not think he himself could do better; he would, he
said, be a “bad candidate and a poor President.”

I sat through the long, grim evening with increasing hopelessness,
while Charles Murphy, a dedicated Fair Dealer deeply devoted to Tru-
man, cringed at Adlai s blasphemies. Why was Adlai so determined to
throw away his chances? Exasperated by his aggressive negativism, I
drank too much Scotch to compensate for my chagrin and commemo-
rated a distasteful evening by a repellent hangover.

On the plane to Florida, Adlai wrote Ruth a touching note. As the
plane approached Jacksonville, “the miseries,” he wrote, were “melting
away.” Yet the noose still felt uncomfortably tight, and he wished he could
see “where the paths of self-interest and family interest converged with
paths of duty.” Then he added as a postscript: “George’s interest and
confidence in me is one of the most compelling reasons why I have not
taken myself out of this situation conclusively and long before this!”

Three days later, Stevenson wrote Charles Murphy from Florida,
listing all the reasons why he did not wish to be a candidate, including
his misgivings about “his strength, wisdom, and humility to point the
way to coexistence with a ruthless, inscrutable, and equal power in the
world.” I hen he, for the first time, openly revealed his tactical thinking:
Another four years as Governor of my beloved Illinois, and many of
these obstacles will have vanished. As a more seasoned politician, with
my work in Illinois behind me, creditably, pray God, I might well be
ready and even eager to seek the Presidency, if I then had anything
desirable to offer.”

I had, he wrote Murphy, been “under the distinct impression from
my last visit with the President that, given my Illinois situation, he was
quite reconciled to run again himself. If I misunderstood him, or that is
no longer the case and the question is whether I would accept the nom-
ination at Chicago and then do my level best to win the election, I should

n 8 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

like to know it.” If the President has decided not to run, he wrote, “and
my decision is affirmative, I suppose in sincerity and good conscience I
should say publicly and before he announces his decision not to run (if
such is his decision) that all I want is to carry on my work in Illinois; that
I have no other ambition, desire or purpose; that I will not seek the
nomination; that if my party should nominate me anyway I would accept
proudly and prayerfully, of course.” 1 The sentence continued, “as should
any American in good health with convictions about this tormented
world.” 2 He was “confident that the people of Illinois would release [him]
for a larger assignment that [he] did not seek.” f inally, he wrote about
his possible nomination: “Now if you have waded this deep and the Pres-
ident should feel that this offers a plausible solution, I should of course
like to know so that I can reach a final decision and inform him at what-
ever time he prescribes.” 3

Murphy, as I later learned, wrote to Adlai: President Truman was
“much impressed by what you had to say — impressed in the sense that it
confirmed and strengthened the high regard he already had for you. . . .
He said that he would like to think the matter over for a few days, and
would then talk to me about it again.” 4 Murphy then made clear that, in
spite of Stevenson’s strong rejection of Truman’s liberal policies, the
President was personally still eager for Stevenson to run.

Launching a Candidate

On Saturday, March 29, 1952, Stevenson came to Washington to
appear on “Meet the Press.” At the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner the
night before, Truman was expected to announce his own decision about
a second term. When Truman flatly announced that he would not run
again, the photographers and reporters promptly converged on Steven-
son. I went from the dinner to the Metropolitan Club to talk with Adlai
about his “Meet the Press” appearance, since I feared he might use the
occasion to take himself categorically out of the race. During the tele-
vision program — to my great relief — he adroitly avoided being forced
into a “General Sherman” statement. Moreover, he did not take the same
strong line against liberal legislation he had taken during the meeting
with Murphy.

That night, Stevenson and I dined with Walter Lippmann, who told
Adlai, “I hope you don’t run, because you can’t possibly beat such a
national hero as Eisenhower.” To my surprise, Stevenson reacted sharply
and indignantly: “What do you mean? Why are you sure I can’t beat
Eisenhower?” The next morning, Lippmann called me, somewhat upset.
“Why did Adlai Hare up when we discussed his running? I tried to dis-
courage him because I like both Ike and him, but I think the country
needs a change of parties. I’d be put to a painful choice if they both

Stevenson 119

ran. (Later, when Adlai was in the early stages of the campaign, Helen
Lippmann sent me a check for $1000. It was the only time, she explained,
that the Lippmanns had ever broken their practice of remaining above
the battle.)

Several days later, I asked Arthur Schlesinger and Bernard De Voto
to prepare a draft statement to launch Stevenson’s Presidential candi-
dacy. I he pace of events rapidly quickened. A committee of students
and faculty members at Yale got in touch with me and then sent Steven-
son a telegram asking him to run. My own mail was crowded with letters
advising me that 1 must make Stevenson take a more affirmative posi-
tion — as though I could possibly control him.

Why was Stevenson so reluctant? Largely, I think, because he thought
he could not beat Eisenhower. If it had been clear that Taft would be
nominated, he would have taken a different line. He could beat Taft
and would feel a duty to do so, since Taft symbolized the Middle- West-
ern isolationism against which he had long fought. But Eisenhower was
an internationalist and, in Stevenson’s view, a decent man who might
improve the moral tone of the White House. He was affronted by the
indifferent morality and untidiness of the Truman Administration and
was frantic to distance himself from Truman and the messiness, which,
as he repeatedly told me, proved that the Democrats had been too long
in power. “ 1 wenty years,” he said, “is enough for either party.” He felt
deeply sentimental about Illinois, and he abhorred a partisan struggle
that might set him at cross purposes with his Lake Forest friends, who
had voted for him as a state governor but would vote Republican in a
national election. In addition, he lived under the persistent threat of
personal attack, since Ellen, now divorced, was capable of unlimited mal-
ice. Finally, he was repelled by the stultifying routine of campaigning.
Though he loved making carefully crafted speeches, he hated the con-
stant repetition of banalities, the vacuous irrelevance of campaign issues,
and the handshaking, posturing, and babykissing that the public had
learned to expect of a candidate. Finally, the vast expenditures involved
in campaigning of fended the parsimonious instincts of a Calvinist Scot;
he loathed the whole process of political fund raising.

On April 16, he issued a statement that, he maintained, would defin-
itively make clear his position. It contained a critical sentence: “In view
of my prior commitment to run for Governor and my desire and the
desire of many who have given me their help and confidence in our
unfinished work in Illinois, I could not accept the nomination for any
other office this summer.” I found Jesuitical comfort in the fact that he
had used the word could instead of “would.” He well knew the differ-
ence between “cannot,” which was a simple statement of how he then
saw his position, and “will not,” which would have denoted a firm deci-
sion not to accept in any circumstances. He liked to play with linguistic

120

Adlai Stevenson and Politics

nuances, and it later appeared that this precise choice of words was not
unintentional. The original draft statement prepared by Carl McGowan
had read: “I cannot and will not accept the nomination.” Stevenson had
changed that to “I cannot, in good conscience, accept”; he later deleted
the phrase “in good conscience.”

I had deep affection for Stevenson, and I admired his contempt for
the opportunism that marks most politicians. Yet I did not like the fact
that he constantly overdramatized his own predicament — portraying
himself as a hero beset by temptations, while at the same time indulging
in a self-disparagement that was tinged with artifice. 1 recall once return-
ing a draft letter he had shown me with the comment: “Why go out of
your way to diminish yourself with that self-deprecatory horseshit when
you know you don’t believe it?” To which he answered with a rueful
smile, “Oh, leave it in. 1 think it’s disarming, don’t you?”

That Stevenson was sincerely torn between a tempting chance to
become President and the desire to avoid any appearance of personal
ambition I have no doubt. But his constant harping on the Presidency as
an “ordeal” seemed to me overdone. Thus, when he flawed his otherwise
brilliant acceptance speech with the words “I have asked the merciful
Father— the Father of us all— to let this cup pass from me,” I was horri-
fied; it seemed both self-pitying and presumptuous (though I could not
help but recall that it was the same figure of speech my old friend Leon
Blum had used when the Popular Front’s victory in 1936 made him
Prime Minister). Blum, however, had had more reason to allude to the
cup; in Stevenson’s case it was one of his rare gaucheries. The responsi-
bilities of the Presidency were indubitably a heavy burden, but during
the life of our nation, the job had been filled by many unexceptional
men, and Stevenson was certainly far better prepared and equipped than
most of them had been. As for the self-sacrifice involved, that seemed a
bromidic emphasis for a man who had spent all of his life preparing for
public service.

Meanwhile, events were moving ineluctably toward a draft that I
am convinced — he saw as the solution to his predicament. It would absolve
him from the charge that he was Truman’s hand-picked candidate or
had sought the nomination; even more important, it would end his pri-
vate torment at the thought of entering a contest he might lose because
the timing was askew. The Democrats had worn out their welcome in
the White House; they had lost energy and imagination — witness the
tawdriness and petty scandals of the Truman Administration. Since, in
the pervasive mood of public disenchantment, no Democrat could beat
a national hero like Eisenhower, why not let some eager aspirant — Alben
W. Barkley or Estes Kefauver— try and fail? Four years in the wilderness
might rejuvenate the party; a military President would almost certainly
disappoint the exorbitant expectations he was arousing, while time would

Stevenson 121

diminish the luster of Ike’s wartime achievements. After a Republican
first term, Adlai believed the country might be in a proper mood for a
Democratic Second Coming; if, meanwhile, he had done a good job in
Illinois — as he was sure he would — he might well be what the hour
required. But I told him: “Does anyone remember General Boulanger
except as a vain and silly ass who waited too long? Of course, it’s too
bad opportunity has come prematurely, but taut pis. History has bad
manners; it won’t arrange itself to suit your personal convenience.”

He was, I felt sure, deluding himself to think he could wait four
years. Barring accident, Eisenhower would almost certainly run for a
second term, and history had shown that, except during periods of major
catastrophe, an incumbent President is only rarely upset. Since Eisen-
hower was as yet untested in national politics, it was by no means certain
that he would sweep the country; besides, Taft might be nominated. All
this I argued with conviction; few people, I said, had been offered the
opportunity that now lay open to Stevenson and if he did not walk
through the door resolutely, it would close in his face — if not with a
bang, at least with a click as the bolt slid into place.

The Nomination

In the beginning, I had believed an uncontrived draft impossible —
ruled out by our American political experience. But toward the middle
of March I became convinced that, unless Adlai made a definitive “Gen-
eral Sherman” statement, the mounting tide of opinion within the party
would lead to his nomination in July. Still, I had moments of trepidation
during conversations with professionals in the party who no longer hid
their mounting impatience. Adlai’s ambiguous conduct was lending sub-
stance to the charge that he could not make up his mind, and America
needed to be led by a man of decision. “To govern,” as Mendes-France
was fond of saying, “is to choose.”

Meanwhile, Stevenson was being vigorously promoted by a mixed
bag of enthusiasts — largely academics and young lawyers, but with a
tempering of Southern conservatives — while the pols, such as Mayor
Daley of Chicago, Mayor Dave Lawrence of Pittsburgh, and Jack Arvey,
were under increasing pressure to declare support for a candidate who,
they could be sure, would not back out at the last moment. Stevenson
seemed to be enjoying their discomfort. I think he knew that, other than
issuing a statement of categorical withdrawal, he could do little to stop
the buildup of sentiment, since he offered the Democratic party its only
hope against Eisenhower. The small impetus added by Stevenson’s
friends, including my own efforts, did not, I think, play a critical role in
the outcome. Much more important was the fact that, while Stevenson
incessantly denied his candidacy, he continued to make — in a wider

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Adlai Stevenson and Politics

national setting — speeches that distinguished him from what he referred
to as “the current year’s crop of political cattle — far from blue-ribbon
quality.” He continued to demur, however, reveling in the drama of inner
struggle: visibly gratified as more and more people urged him to run,
called him the indispensable man, and insisted that duty required him
to assume the burdens of the Presidency. The more he resisted, the more
emotional were the exhortations.

Adlai was more pleased by the praise of the literate than by massive
outbursts from those deaf to the eloquence of his thought and expres-
sion. He liked particularly to be fussed over by his many female admirers,
which sometimes proved a serious handicap. Candidates are invariably
surrounded by hangers-on who, if not sycophants, still feel obliged to
maintain their tiger’s morale, and Adlai was exceptionally vulnerable to
uncritical praise and encouragement. He suffered from not having a
wife (the institutionalized candid friend). No one was waiting to tell him,
after an inept action or uninspired speech; “Well, you were really not up
to standard this evening.” Instead, he basked in constant encomiums
from a bevy of acolytes who loved him dearly and treated him as the
long-awaited Messiah; increasingly, he tended to make statements that
pleased his admirers but did not advance his more mundane objectives.

During the convention, I took no part in the rounding up of dele-
gates — a task for which I had neither talent nor inclination. Seated among
the press corps, I listened to Stevenson’s memorable welcoming speech.
As the applause grew louder, Joe Alsop climbed onto the chair next to
me, waving and shouting, “My God, I would never have believed it, a
Brahman intellectual — and they’re eating out of his hand.” The next day
I struggled with the draft of an acceptance speech that I handed to Ste-
venson’s assistant, William Blair, at Blair’s family’s residence, where Ste-
venson had gone to ground. (None of my draft was used.) Though the
house was staked out by waiting newspaper reporters and heavily guarded
by the police, the atmosphere inside seemed strangely hushed — with the
same sense of reverence but none of the easy camaraderie of a wake.

The Campaign Begins

Once the convention was concluded, Ruth and I returned to Wash-
ington, where I wrote Stevenson a letter offering my services. Before
receiving it, he telephoned to ask that I lend a hand to his old friends
“Dutch” Smith and Jane Dick in Chicago, who were endeavoring to put
together a committee of volunteers outside the regular campaign struc-
ture. Dutch Smith had been chairman of the Stevenson for Governor
Committee, in which Jane Dick had played a leading role, and they
understandably viewed their new enterprise in the same terms as the
state committee — merely expanded to a national scale. Such a transfor-

Stevenson 123

mation could not be done literally, however, since a large number of the
leaders of the state committee were Republicans who, though support-
ing Adlai when the issues were local, still believed God wanted a Repub-
lican as President.

After several long discussions, the three of us agreed to establish the
“Volunteers for Stevenson.” (Eisenhower’s people had already preempted
the “Citizen” name.) Dutch Smith was to be Chairman of the Volunteers
and Jane Dick, Co-chairman, while I would have the title of Executive
Director. We had one meeting with Stevenson at Springfield and then
went to work. Since political organizing was largely a task for the regular
Stevenson Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Commit-
tee working with local Democratic party leaders throughout the country,
I started looking for a finance chairman. Fund raising was, as I saw it,
the prime function of the Volunteers. But since the rich and well-placed
were, almost by definition, committed to Eisenhower, I had difficulty
finding a finance chairman. Eventually someone mentioned Roger L.
Stevens, who had recently bought and sold the Empire State Building.
He was, I was told, both shrewd and independent. I might possibly per-
suade him to take the job.

I called Stevens and arranged to meet him in New York City. He was
candid and tough-minded, a self-made millionaire but one who did not
worship money and disdained the conventional wisdom. The fact that
he loved the theater and was a leading theatrical producer added to his
charm, yet he was a man with no false pretensions and I liked him
immediately. Though inexperienced in politics, he would, I felt sure,
add stiength to our effort. It proved a brilliant choice; Stevens was
resourceful, energetic, and an engaging companion. He was on the way
to carving out a commanding place for himself in the New York theater
world, and he would years later lead the Kennedy Center in Washington
toward cultural eminence.

The New Factor of Television

W ilson Wyatt, an able and personable Louisville lawyer who had in
his mid-thirties been mayor of Louisville, became Stevenson’s personal
campaign manager. He and I agreed that the Volunteers should concen-
trate on raising funds for Stevenson’s television appearances — a task of
transcendent importance, since the 1952 campaign was the first in which
television was extensively used. During the 1948 campaign, Dewey and
Truman campaigned in a manner little changed from the days of Roo-
sevelt, with whistle stops, set speeches to large city audiences, and the
customary handshaking and babykissing — supplemented to a limited
degree by radio. At the time of the Truman-Dewey campaign, there had
been only 345,000 television sets in the United States; by 1952, the num-

124

Adlai Stevenson and Politics

ber had risen almost fifty times — to 17 million. (It was to increase almost
twice again by 1956.) Clearly, in Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, the medium
had become the message.

We were fortunate that our campaign staff was not taken over by
television experts and that the public was not yet accustomed to the con-
temptuous treatment they later came to accept from political candidates.
We took it for granted that Americans had an attention span sufficiently
long to absorb rational arguments. The strength of our position, as we
saw it, derived from the fact that Stevenson’s positions were not only
sounder than Eisenhower’s but also far more eloquently expressed.

Adlai sincerely believed that a campaign should be used for public
education ; so we planned a coherent series of speeches, each concerned
with a single relevant issue. Television, of course, imposed some con-
straint on Adlai’s oratory, since each speech had to be packed into twenty-
seven minutes. But the saturation spot-campaigns that were to reduce
Presidential contests to the level of mouthwash merchandising had not
yet been devised.

Anatomy of Speech Writing

In retrospect, I am sure we overestimated the impact of Stevenson’s
speeches. They provided a pleasurable experience, deeply moving to
anyone responsive to the cadence and melody of fine writing, but they
were not always effective advocacy. Adlai honed and polished words,
sentences, and paragraphs, but he paid little attention to structure. He
hated to concentrate on a single theme; instead, he would frequently
clutter his speeches with unrelated subjects, thus diffusing the overall
effect. I struggled with him often over this practice. He was, I assured
him, a “gifted poet” but a “lousy architect.” While his speeches left a
pleasant glow and a sense of momentary uplift, they did not persuade
his audience that he knew how to deal with particular problems. By con-
trast, Eisenhower’s far more banal speeches, though leaden and deliv-
ered without sensitivity to the nuances of language, almost always set
forth a “five-point” or a “seven-point” program, or some similar enun-
ciation of proposed actions. It did not matter if those programs were
empty of meaning, they gave the impression that Ike knew exactly how

he would resolve all the nation’s troubles.

Adlai rejected the practice with a shudder; to list specific projected
actions was, in his view, not only casuistical but also an intrusion on the
beautiful music of words that he found most gratifying. Television was
not a medium well suited to Adlai’s style; again, through no fault of his
own, he was a victim of unlucky timing. Had he been running four years
earlier, when only radio was available, he would have done much better.
But he was physically unimpressive — short and with what he called a

Stevenson 125

receding hairline” — and had no “normal” speaking pace. He would start
a speech too slowly, then realize that he might run over his time and
abruptly speed up, or he would start speaking too quickly and abruptly
slow down. Though we carefully computed the length of each written
speech, he failed more often than not to finish on time, thus flawing the
effect of his carefully crafted perorations. After a while, the problem of
finishing within the required twenty-seven minutes became a phobia that
added a sense of the precarious to every appearance.

Nor did television adequately project his personality. Reading his
speeches from manuscript, he often failed to look at the camera, inclin-
ing his head so that the lights beat glaringly on his shining forehead,
which grew more obtrusive as the hairline receded. In addition, he had
a habit that suggested a tic: punctuating his comments by flashing on
and off a quick smile, which conveyed the unfortunate impression of
artificiality and even insincerity. Nevertheless, as we listened to the
speeches we felt enormously proud. Our candidate had “class”; he was
not a plodding five-star general uttering pedestrian language written by
some journalistic hack with all the grace of a gun carriage being hauled
across cobblestones; he was a man of culture and intellect seeking not
only to educate the country but also to elevate its taste.

In making sure we could pay for the necessary television and radio
time, Roger Stevens displayed audacity above and beyond the call of
duty. Although the networks would extend credit to a permanent orga-
nization such as the Democratic National Committee, they required pay-
ment before air time for programs sponsored by organizations such as
the Volunteers, which had only a firefly’s life span. On at least one occa-
sion — and perhaps even two or three — Roger Stevens either arranged
last-minute bank credit or advanced funds of his own literally minutes
in advance of a broadcast. It lent our proceedings an extra air of excite-
ment, since we did not know till the last minute whether or not our
candidate would be on the air.

Life in Springfield

Once Stevens had taken over the financial problems of the Volun-
teers, I began spending most of my time in Springfield, working directly
with Wilson Wyatt, Stevenson’s campaign manager. I not only helped
resolve the inevitable conflicts between the Volunteers and the cam-
paign’s professional management, but, on Wyatt’s request, assisted with
the direction of the campaign.

With one or two exceptions, none of us, including Stevenson, knew
much about running a modern Presidential campaign. Adlai’s insistence
that campaign headquarters be located in Springfield imposed intolera-
ble burdens on Wyatt and his colleagues. No doubt a campaign head-

126 Acllai Stevenson and Politics

quarters in Springfield helped reinforce a number of points Stevenson
constantly sought to make: he was independent of Truman; he was a
child of the Middle West; he was not neglecting his duties as Governor
while pursuing the Presidency; and he was demonstrating his abhor-
rence of slickness and the flamboyant display of wealth characteristic of
Republican efforts. Yet no one other than Adlai could have thought it
feasible to establish the campaign headquarters in a tiny, run-down frame
cottage. The arrangement made the constantly shifting contingent of
press and television correspondents, campaign helpers, and political
“groupies” restive and cantankerous. Though Springfield was geo-
graphically near the center of the country, that was all one could say for
it. Direct air service was minimal; no modern hotels existed in the area;
and urban amenities were meager. When a distinguished correspondent
such as James Reston stayed there for several weeks, he felt as though
he had been banished to Ouagadougou — and resented it.

Stevenson cheerfully left such problems to Wyatt, a man of excep-
tional qualities. Wyatt was invariably good-natured, friendly, and opti-
mistic, while at the same time thoughtful and realistic. Though he dealt
with his unmanageable candidate as best he could, he had little staff but
volunteers and no place to put anyone. During the whole campaign, we
raised and spent only half as much money as our Republican opposition.
Yet even though we lacked money, the word that best describes the cam-
paign is “ebullience.” We were proud when our candidate attracted men
and women of wit and brilliance; Stevenson set the tone, and his speeches
contained an unparalleled level of humorous comment. His was the
poignant defense of civilized man against the bathos and banality of
political campaigning — America’s theater of the absurd.

Political Volunteers

Though I was nominally Executive Director of the Volunteers, it was
not a role suited to my temperament or inclinations. I have a distaste for
high-minded but amateur zealotry. If the heads of our local Volunteer
groups were frequently men and women of assertive good will, they were,
more often than not, at odds with the local politicians — whom they
regarded as a lesser breed. Moreover, the local Volunteer groups were
too frequently captured by pushy and overbearing individuals primarily
interested in the trappings of power — people who claimed, on the basis
of wealth, social position, or connections, a high place in the pecking
order. Of course, the sincerely dedicated — and they were legion — effec-
tively promoted the candidate’s cause.

I had no flair for politics as an art form; my interest was solely in the
content of the candidate’s message. Nor could I conceal my revulsion at
the groveling deference candidates are expected to show toward power

Stevenson 12 7

groups. They descend in hordes, seeking by threat or by promise of
campaign money or votes to buy the candidate’s support of their partic-
ular objectives a sweeping endorsement of the Greek or Israeli govern-
ment s policies or aid to parochial schools or the rights of Hispanics,
Chicanos, or Choctaw Indians or the freedom of any moron to buy a
gun. In Spiingheld, I could avoid most of this. I felt admiration and
affection for Wilson Wyatt, and we found it remarkably easy to work
together.

I shall refrain from retelling the history of the 1952 campaign but
not, in Max Beerbohm s words, because giving an accurate account
would need a pen far less brilliant than mine.” My more modest reason
is that the campaign story has been told in detail in John Bartlow Mar-
tin s comprehensive biography of Stevenson. Nevertheless, two incidents
stand out in my mind — for quite disparate reasons.

The Nixon Attacks

Stevenson had started his campaign on August 27. By attacking super
patriots and McCarthyites in a deliberately tough speech to the Ameri-
can Legion Convention, he established at the outset his independence
and candor. The response clarified Republican tactics. Eisenhower would
take the high road with only occasional detours down the slope; Nixon,
running for Vice-President, would, by infallible instinct, operate at the
level where the language of abuse would have the maximum resonance.
Stevenson, announced Nixon— with his penchant for the elegant
phrase— was a “weakling, a waster, and a small-caliber Truman” who
had been elected Governor by a political organization with “mobsters,
gangsters, and remnants of the Capone gang.” He was, he said, “Adlai
the Appeaser . . . , who got a Ph.D. from Dean Acheson’s College of
Cowardly Communist Containment.” So, he concluded, “. . . the word
of I ruman and Acheson, as well as that of Acheson’s former assistant,
Adlai Stevenson, gives the American people no hope for safety at home
from the sinister threat of Communism.” At Texarkana, on October 27,
Nixon was reported as telling a crowd that President Truman and Adlai
Stevenson were “traitors to the high principles of the Democratic party
. . . [who] tolerated and defended Communists in the government.” As
he had advised others to do, he “put on a fighting, rocking, socking
campaign.” 5 Although Stevenson, like Queen Victoria, was “not amused,”
he scornfully refused to take on Nixon. He was campaigning against
Eisenhower and would not demean himself by arguing with Eisen-
hower’s hired gun.

Nixon was propelled to the center of the stage only three weeks after
the campaign began when, on September 18, the press broke the story
of his $18,000 fund. Had Nixon explained the fund forthrightly both to

128 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

the country and to Eisenhower it would probably have proved only a
passing incident, for most people saw nothing inherently wrong with
such a fund if it could be shown that it was not used to buy influence.
But, since Nixon could never resist a chance for demagoguery, he
adopted a sanctimonious pose of self-pity, seeking to associate himself
with other beleaguered Americans burdened by debt and family anxie-
ties who sought comfort in their inner nobility of purpose. The resulting
Checkers speech ran the whole gamut of emotional claptrap from the
little family dog to “Pat’s respectable Republican cloth coat,” while Nixon
presciently anticipated today’s Geritol commercials with the endearing
phrase: “I always tell her that she’d look good in anything.”

His formula never varied; every speech was a chapter in a child’s
version of Pilgrim' s Progress , in which Christian, the hero, nobly resisted
temptations to which less worthy men would quickly have succumbed.
“There’s some that will say, ‘Well, maybe you were able, Senator, to fake
this thing. How can we believe what you say — after all, is there a possi-
bility that maybe you got some sums in cash? Is there a possibility that
you may have feathered your own nest?’ He was, he implied, the noble
victim slandered by Democrats. Though he found it an excruciating
ordeal to “bare [his] life” on a nationwide hookup, he faced it because
his country was in danger and the only man who could save it was Dwight
Eisenhower.

I listened to this emetic sciamachy with perverse pleasure; Nixon was
confirming for all to see what I had long thought of him. How could any
American voter be taken in by such an archetypical confidence man?
Even after an unprecedented outpouring of approving telegrams and
press comment, I awaited the second wave, assuring Walter Lippmann
that “Americans are cannier than you think; in due course, they 11 feel
the symptoms of post-coitum tristesse” But Lippmann was skeptical.
Though he described the reaction to the speech as “simply mob law,” we
were, he feared, entering a new era in which a candidate could, by
exploiting television, make the people feel he was one of them. That
would be the end of any serious debate over issues.

The whole incident disturbed me. That I had so lamentably under-
estimated America’s tolerance — indeed, America’s avidity — for hypocrit-
ical banalities challenged the central assumption of our campaign. Why
try to “talk sense to the American people” — as Stevenson put it — if they
could be so deceived by cheap claptrap? It would take them twenty-two
more years to discover Nixon’s vast capacity for fraud.

When Stars Collide

I mention the second incident purely for comic relief. Presidential
campaigns throw together men and women of diverse talents, and most

Stevenson 129

of Hollywood clustered about the glamorous Ike. Yet Stevenson also
attracted a few devoted stage and screen luminaries — principally Lauren
Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, and Mercedes McCambridge. On one occa-
sion, at the request of the playwright Robert E. Sherwood, I arranged
for composer Richard Rodgers to meet our candidate, while Rodgers in
turn persuaded Tallulah Bankhead and Ethel Barrymore to appear
together in a campaign photograph that I supervised. I listened in fas-
cination as Ethel Barrymore tearfully complained to Tallulah, “You
deliberately seated us this way so they’ll photograph my bad side.” To
which Tallulah replied in her famous throaty voice, “Dahling, how could
you ever suspect me of such a cruel thing? Even if I had thought of it, I
would never have done that to you — but, of course, the thought never
occurred to me since I don’t have a bad side.”

The Campaign Concludes

Toward the middle of the campaign, Stevenson began to dislike
Eisenhower. He was disgusted when Ike not only failed to repudiate
McCarthy but endorsed his candidacy for the Senate. He was even more
disgusted when Ike failed to denounce McCarthy’s attack on General
Marshall (who had done more than anyone else to advance Ike’s career)
and, even after that insult, had appeared on the same platform with
McCarthy. Finally, he resented the tactical benefit Eisenhower derived
by announcing that, if elected, he would go to Korea, since Stevenson
had himself pondered such a proposal at an earlier point but discarded
it as demagogic.

In recounting history, one should try to recreate the mood and
emotions of the time. Adlai was right in avoiding strong identification
with the Truman Administration. The Democrats had been in power a
long time, and the Truman Administration showed signs of weariness;
its most talented members had departed, leaving mediocre men in high
places to quarrel publicly. The party had been entrusted with power in
a period of searing depression and had carried the country through a
global war; now the policies and attitudes forged by such cataclysms had
lost relevance.

As Stevenson put it to his friends, the party had run out of poor
people and run into the Korean War, and the public automatically
assumed that a war could best be dealt with by a general. Thus Adlai’s
candidacy was — as he well knew — out of phase with the times. What the
country needed was a soothing father figure who would let people relax;
it did not want a man who talked in uplifting phrases of the dangers and
challenges of a complex and hazardous age. In view of the public mood,
it is surprising that Adlai got as many votes as he did. Though he lost,
the 195 2 campaign — no matter how ill organized and meagerly

1 30 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

financed — was something of which we could all be proud. Stevenson
himself felt, as he told me many years later, that it was the high point of
his life; everything afterwards was an anticlimax. He had put into that
campaign the accumulated thought and experience of many years, and
phrases from his 1952 speeches still generate an echo.

Reluctant as he may have been to enter the race, once Adlai made a
total commitment to the campaign he convinced himself he could win.
That was evident in many of our private conversations during those
intense days and nights. For example, when someone insisted that he
pay the politician’s ritual homage by calling on Cardinal Spellman, he
responded petulantly, “For God’s sake, don’t you characters believe we’re
going to win big enough so that kind of noxious business isn’t neces-
sary?” In his definitive biography of Adlai Stevenson, John Bartlow Mar-
tin reports that the belief in victory was shared by almost all members of
the campaign entourage. But Wilson Wyatt and I were at least two
exceptions, as we revealed to one another during a long walk on the
afternoon of Election Day, November 1952, when nothing more could
be done. Wyatt abruptly asked, “All right, tell me what you think?” I
hesitated because I did not want to upset my friend and colleague, who,
I assumed, shared the common faith in victory. Then I replied, “Well,
we haven’t won, but we gave it a hell of a try.” Much to my surprise,
Wyatt answered quietly, “You’re right. It hasn’t worked. We haven’t had
time to turn it around.”

I spent the day numb and dreading the evening. A few of us had
dinner with Adlai at the executive mansion. Later, Wilson Wyatt and I
went to an election-night headquarters in the Leland Hotel, where facil-
ities were installed to keep in touch with each state and monitor the
returns. Since Springfield was an hour earlier than the East, we put a
call through to Connecticut and, the two of us on the line, heard the
Connecticut political boss John Bailey report lugubriously: “They’re
murdering us; it’s a total disaster.” The dreary evening became even
grimmer as we drifted back and forth between the hotel and mansion
while the returns were translating nightmares into reality. Finally, well
after midnight, several of us went with Adlai to the hotel headquarters
to hear his generous and graceful concession speech.

Ten years later, listening to another candidate who had just lost an
election for Governor of California, I thought of the stark difference in
style and quality of the two men. Stevenson told an Abraham Lincoln
anecdote of a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark: “He said he
was too old to cry but it hurt too much to laugh.” The other candidate’s
comment — so different in spirit — was quite as much in character: “Now
you won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.”

After the concession speech, we wandered back to the mansion, where
a mixed group had gathered. It included a number of Adlai’s Lake For-

The 1956 Campaign and After 131

est friends, most of whom had, as they smugly announced, voted for
Eisenhower, including one gloating female whose pneumatic bosom was
asserted by a diamond Eisenhower pin. When another guest said, “Gov-
ernor, you didn’t win, but you educated the country with your great cam-
paign, Stevenson replied pointedly, “But a lot of people flunked the
course.”

As I wrote later,

Adlai was remarkably composed and serene, the only blithe member of a
doleful group. He had no taste, he said, for political wakes — “especially when
I m the corpse.” He consoled us as though we, not he, were the losers, at one
point disappearing into the kitchen for ajeroboam of victory champagne some-
one had sent him. Always the Scotsman, he insisted on not wasting it. Always the
considerate host, he insisted on pouring it himself.

Finally, he announced that since he had lost the election the least he could
do was to make the toast. And so, with Adlai, we all raised our glasses while he
offered a tribute to “Wilson Wyatt, the best campaign manager any unsuccessful
politician ever had.”

He described himself wrongly, of course, as we all knew. He was no “unsuc-
cessful politician, but a brave leader who had given a whole generation of
Americans a cause for w r hich many could, for the first time, feel deeply proud —
a man of prophetic quality who, in Arthur Schlesinger’s phrase, “set the tone for
a new era in Democratic politics.”

Only one person present that evening would have dared to call Adlai Steven-
son “unsuccessful” — and we loved him for it. For we had each of us, at different
times and in different ways, discovered that sense of decency and proportion,
humility and infallible good manners which led him so often to understate-
ment particularly when he spoke of himself. And we would not have had him
otherwise . 6

10 . The 1956 Campaign and After

for those who fought at the hot gates, the 1952 campaign
marked a high point of excitement and exhilaration. Then, abruptly,
evei ything came to a halt. For a day or two, Ruth and I lingered in
Springfield; finally as though to defer getting up on a cold morning —
we set off on a leisurely and circuitous drive back to Washington. Adlai
saw us off and, as usual, relieved the poignancy of the moment with his
wry comment, “What a relief it is to have the damn campaign fin-
ished! Next Sunday I won t have to go to church. I can turn over and go
to sleep.”

Other than a war or protracted intoxication, there is nothing that
more completely diverts one from reality than a political campaign; now

132 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

I had to pick up the ragged ends of a law practice in disarray. One friend
who seemed to be suffering a similar symptom was Senator J. William
Fulbright. He had been a buoyant visitor at our Springfield headquar-
ters; now I found him annoyed and disconsolate. Catching the liberal
Senators off-guard, the young Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson had
put himself forward as Democratic leader in the Senate, and it was now
too late to block his selection. That meant, Fulbright said, that conserva-
tive Democrats would control the Senate, and Johnson would go along
with almost anything President Eisenhower proposed. Stevenson, he
insisted, must lead the party, yet we both knew that a man out of office
could not easily keep himself in the public eye. During one of our fre-
quent lunches or dinners Walter Lippmann expressed the same view.
The party, Lippmann said, would be run by Senators and Congressmen;
Stevenson would be pushed increasingly into the cold.

Despite this conventional wisdom, Adlai managed during the next
four years to maintain himself as far more than the titular head of the
party. His tour de force attested to the spell he cast over the articulate
liberals, and particularly the young who had first tasted politics in the
golden days of 1952. His voice was heard and often heeded, and he had
an astute sense of timing. In New York early in February 1953, he made
a powerful speech to Eastern Democrats, laying out the broad directions
of Democratic opposition. Then, after conferring with party leaders and
making further political speeches, he left for a trip around the world,
returning only in the latter part of August.

Early Planning for the 1956 Campaign

Stevenson knew that if he were to run again in 1956 he not only had
to maintain high visibility but gain greater understanding of the issues
of the day. Several of us (including John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur
Schlesinger, and Chester Bowles) fretted over that problem, but it was
Thomas Finletter who initiated a continuing seminar. From October 1953
to November 1956, the so-called f inletter group met irregularly, usually
at Finletter’s apartment in New York (though one meeting was held in
Chicago with Stevenson and another at Cambridge). Papers were pro-
duced on almost every relevant issue facing the United States govern-
ment. The authors had in most cases served in prior Democratic
administrations and, though many were academicians, most of the papers
took account of political realities.

Adlai spoke highly of our efforts, but he attended few meetings and
when he did attend gave little evidence of having read the position papers.
That reinforced my long-held suspicion that he had little taste for the
arduous laboratory work of dissecting tough issues, cutting through the
gristle to the bone, and paring away the obfuscating tissue. He preferred

The 1936 Campaign and After 133

to talk generally about problems and was bored by their technical com-
plexities. Yet, if we did not educate our potential candidate, we did build
up a valuable dossier of position papers that provided Stevenson and his
writers with ready-made speech materials during the 1956 campaign.
That was justification enough for the time and effort we committed.

Of all Stevenson’s achievements during that period, I was most proud
of his brilliant, forthright attack on McCarthyism in a speech he deliv-
ered in March 1954 at Miami Beach. By denouncing the craven action
of the Eisenhower Administration in exploiting McCarthy for its own
political purposes, he forced Eisenhower to make at least a pro forma
reply. Since Ike assigned that task to Nixon, the answer was characteris-
tically cheap and snide.

Whenever Adlai and I met during those years in the wilderness, we
talked about his prospects for 1956. Almost by rote he disparaged the
idea of a second campaign, yet I grew increasingly convinced that, at the
appropriate time, he would make the hard decision. In April 1955, I
worked with him on a national radio speech about Quemoy and Matsu —
those small, irrelevant offshore islands that were to play such a quaint
but important role in the Kennedy-Nixon campaign in i960. Stevenson
sharply cautioned Eisenhower against intervening to save the islands from
an attack by the mainland Chinese, though fully supporting the defense
of Taiwan.

Stevenson set off for Africa in April 1955, and in mid-June Stephen
Mitchell and several others established a steering committee to work for
Stevenson’s nomination in 1956. During the summer, the committee
members began actively rounding up delegates and talking about pri-
maries. Meanwhile, a canny Philadelphia politician, Jim Finnegan, and
a political lawyer from Chicago, Hy Raskin, became Stevenson’s profes-
sional managers. On August 5, I attended a strategy meeting with Ste-
venson at Libertyville. In the latter months of 1955, we spent a great
deal of time developing the themes for a campaign, using the back-
ground work and ongoing organization of the Finletter group.

Eisenhower s Heart Attack

On September 24, 1955, I was attending a Bilderberg meeting in
Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, when we received word of Presi-
dent Eisenhower’s heart attack. Gabriel Hauge, then a White House
assistant who lived next door to me in Washington, left immediately. No
one knew the extent of Eisenhower’s illness, but his heart attack a year
before the 1956 election drastically enhanced the odds for a Democratic
victory. If Eisenhower should die or be precluded from running by ill-
ness, I felt confident that Stevenson could beat Nixon. If, on the other
hand, Eisenhower did run, the fact of his heart attack might raise ques-

134 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

tions about his fitness to be President. By an odd coincidence, Lyndon
Johnson was just at that time also recovering from a heart attack, but I
did not realize how little such events would affect the Presidential future
of either man.

In any event, Ike’s illness made most of us in the Stevenson circle
more eager than ever to start preparing the campaign. Of course, we
foresaw difficulties. Stevenson’s divorce would be a problem in heavily
Catholic districts. He had alienated Harry Truman by indicating in sub-
tle, and not-so-subtle, ways that he disapproved of the wheeling and
dealing that had marred the latter days of Truman’s Presidency. Con-
vinced that Ike’s ill health would assure a Democratic victory, Truman
now seemed to favor Averell Harriman, although he must have recog-
nized Harriman’s limitations as a candidate. Adlai was irked by what he
regarded as Harriman’s lack of grace and subtlety in pushing himself
forward, while Harriman showed visible disdain for Stevenson’s Cincin-
natus pose.

The Minnesota Primary

Meanwhile, Estes Kefauver began to becloud the landscape. Antici-
pating Jimmy Carter years later, he entered all available primaries and
we began to fear that, if he won too many without opposition, he might
build up a momentum the convention could not resist. This second time
around, the pols insisted, Adlai could not remain passive without risking
the critical support of party leaders who were showing increasing evi-
dence of impatience. Though he found the prospect repulsive, Adlai
reluctantly decided in November to enter the Minnesota primary. On
October 21, he had received a letter of support from the young Massa-
chusetts Senator, John F. Kennedy.

During the months after Ike’s heart attack, the Democrats had grown
increasingly optimistic, but in December speculation shifted. The White
House was using every available conjuring device to create the impres-
sion of a resolute Captain Ike vigorously steering the ship of state. They
issued a spate of press releases designed to obscure the fact that he did
not leave Fitzsimmons Army Hospital until November 1 1 and spent the
next several weeks moving between Gettysburg, Camp David, and Key
West. Finally, on February 29, 1956, Eisenhower himself made clear that
he would try to retain the Presidency for another four years.

Americans are sentimental and Ike had public sympathy on his side.
The people wanted him in good health again, radiating a confidence
many trusted because it made them feel good. Even when, in June, he
was taken seriously ill for the second time in less than a year and required
surgery for ileitis, the question of his fitness to serve was scarcely men-
tioned.

The 1956 Campaign and After 135

Stevenson felt pressed by Eisenhower’s illness to demonstrate his own
vigor, overcrowding his schedule and adding Florida as a primary con-
test. It was not a sound decision. Stevenson was temperamentally unfit-
ted for primary campaigns and the mindless posturing and glossolalia
they involved. He liked public life primarily because it gave him the
chance to make speeches of high quality. Presidential campaigns required
only a limited number of major appearances before audiences respon-
sive to views on major issues, but in primaries a candidate often had to
make fifteen or twenty appearances a day in the hope of informing and
educating haphazardly assembled groups of the curious whose cosmic
awareness was all too often limited to the jaundiced jottings of a small-
town editor 01 the windy bombast of some illiterate radio commentator
posing as the world’s greatest all-purpose expert. Under such pressures,
a sensitive candidate could retain his sanity only by throwing his mind
out of gear and endlessly reciting a fixed speech varied only to salute
whatever local political honcho might be in the audience. Stevenson found
this excruciating torture. Still, he could have endured it with only pass-
ing spii itual damage had it not affronted his sense of the appropriate.
“What do they think I am?” he would complain. “A candidate for deputy
sheriff? No one worthy of being President should act like a panhandler,
standing in front of f actory gates or soliciting votes in supermarkets from
housewives come to buy toilet paper. I’m no five-dollar whore.”

He also hated the thought of running against Kefauver, since it sug-
gested that Kefauver and he were in some way comparable. How could
one rationally argue issues with a man whose principal distinction was a
coonskin cap? It was humiliating to have to prove that he was superior
to a second-rate politician; that should have been evident to all. Mean-
while, he was confused by a surfeit of conflicting advice. Many liberal
intellectuals who had vowed undying support in 1952 now complained
that Stevenson was acting like an ordinary candidate. They wanted him
to stay above the battle. I thought then — and still do — that many would
have been happier were he to have lost the primaries; they could then
have boasted of having supported a man of rare quality whom the public
was too crude to appreciate. Now, they bewailed, the professional “pols”
were destroying his exceptionalism.

Those rai ifled views were not shared by the pols themselves or even
by the liberal Senators who attacked Stevenson for not making those tra-
ditional genuflections to clamant special interests that were accepted rit-
ual for a Democratic candidate. He balked at the mystic lodge-brother
phiases that identified the true believer — the simplistic tag words that
transformed the political dialogue into a rote recitation of vapid jargon.
Competing as he was against a mine-run candidate like Kefauver or a
ligid believer like Harriman for the support of liberal elements, partic-
ularly in such self-consciously liberal states as California or Minnesota,

136 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

he came increasingly to resent the pressures to which he was subjected.
His reactions, I once told him, resembled a gyroscope: when pressure
was applied to push him off his natural equilibrium, he instinctively gen-
erated “precession”— a counteracting motion that discouraged the pres-
sure groups. My figure of speech appealed to him, and he insisted on
looking up the word “precession” in a dictionary.

Those of us who knew Adlai encouraged his aversion to doctrinaire
poses. He was far more interested in practical measures than in self-
indulgent bleeding on the barricades. Civil rights were a case in point.
Rather than waving the bloody shirt, as his Northern liberal friends were
urging, he saw his proper role as a conciliator, pressing the Southern
whites toward progress without driving them into obscurantist resis-
tance. America’s policy toward the Arab-Israeli struggle should, he
thought, be formulated in Washington rather than dictated from Jeru-
salem, and he disliked the arrogant manner in which pro-Israeli leaders
dangled the prospect of large campaign contributions in exchange for
uncritical support of whatever self-serving policy a transient Israeli gov-
ernment might than be advocating. Though sympathetic with the broad
purposes of labor, he was averse to putting tight limits on an individual s
right to make his own decisions and would have liked to endorse free-
dom-to-work laws enthusiastically. Nor was he willing to submit to the
excessive demands of the farm lobby or any other special-interest group.

Stevenson was, in other words, a moderate in the true meaning of
the term. Many of his liberal supporters in 1952 had mistakenly assumed
that anyone who spoke so literately and in such high-minded terms would
necessarily meet all the esoteric tests of the true lodge brother. When
they concluded that he did not, they abandoned him in droves, prefer-
ring to see the Democratic party go down to defeat rather than elect a
candidate who did not accept every word in their lexicon of shibboleths.
It was a phenomenon we would see later, and in spades, in 1968, when
American liberals turned viciously against their former hero, Hubert
Humphrey, fatuously arguing the nobility of not voting. How they could
so recklessly contribute to the election of Richard Nixon, I could not
then — nor do I now — understand!

In Minnesota, Adlai’s local supporters, Hubert Humphrey, Orville
Freeman, and Congressman John A. Blatnik, encouraged him to take
the outcome of that state’s primary for granted. But as primary day
approached, Humphrey began to lose confidence, haunted by the fear
that the Republicans might cross over and vote for Kefauver so as to
ease the road for Eisenhower. Those forebodings were well founded.
When the campaign began, Stevenson had been reported as running far
ahead; when the voting took place on March 20, Kefauver received 56
percent of the vote.

I was not involved in the Minnesota primary. I had suggested in

The 1956 Campaign and After 13 7

December that, if Adlai wished it, I would come to Chicago in the spring
and work on the campaign full-time; however, he was cool to the idea. I
was surprised at his reaction, but he told me later that Barbara Ward
had expressed a strong distaste for something I had said. Besides, Ste-
venson implied, I might not fit in well with others on his staff — particu-
larly, I suspect, Willard Wirtz, who had taken over Carl McGowan’s task
as the principal editor of his speeches, and whom I sometimes found
prickly and overly rigid.

If Stevenson did not want me at his headquarters, there were many
other tasks that needed to be done. At the end of March, he asked me
to keep an eye on the preparations for his Florida primary. He knew
that my family maintained a winter home in Florida and that I had spent
at least a fortnight there almost every year since the age of eleven. Thus
he and I both assumed that I had a working knowledge of the state.

The Florida Primary

To be sure, I had traveled to most of the key centers on both the east
and west coasts. But, as I embarked on my new assignment, I discovered
that there is more to Florida than meets the winter visitor’s eye. Politi-
cally it was — and is — not one but several states. As in the case of Califor-
nia, where two-thirds of the population live in the south, the Florida
population is also heavily concentrated in Dade County — or, in other
words, metropolitan Miami. Since Dade County was at the time com-
posed almost entirely of immigrants from the north, principally New
York, the issues that most preoccupied the people were roughly the same
as those they had faced in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. In Flor-
ida s northwest Panhandle, the prevailing views on civil rights were by
contrast roughly those of southern Georgia, just across the border. It
was in this more primitive area that Kefauver planned to make his prin-
cipal gains.

Up to then, my political experience in politics had been almost solely
with urban voters; in Florida, I had a closer look at what — to borrow
tedious jargon from the economists — one might call “micropolitics.” What
I saw was not reassuring from Stevenson’s point of view. In spite of his
moderate approach to civil rights, Floridians in the Panhandle tended
to think of him as a liberal who used big words and was ignorant of their
day-to-day concerns. The Gulf Coast residents around the Tampa-St.
Petersburg area, where wheelchairs far outnumber mopeds, felt much
closer to Kefauver; he was, as they saw it, a simple, good man, who would
better understand their needs, an “old shoe” type who seemed genuinely
concerned for their health and well-being.

Dade County was another matter. There, many residents craved the
respectability they associated with Eisenhower and the Republicans and

ij8 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

were lukewarm about Stevenson because he did not meet the litmus test
with regard to Israel. They would continue to support Eisenhower blindly
even in November 1956, after he had ordered the Israeli armies back
across the Sinai with the only tough demarche to an Israeli government
ever given by an American President.

In the preprimary weeks, I traveled widely over the state to consult
with local leaders. My mentor and companion was a charming Gaines-
ville lawyer with the euphonious name of Benjamin Montgomery (Ben-
mont) Tenche. When Stevenson came to Florida on April 12, for six
days of intensive campaigning, I accompanied him around the state,
where, in ten or twelve speeches a day, he did his best to concentrate on
local issues. He “bitterly denounced,” as he wrote later, “the Japanese
beetle and fearlessly attacked the Mediterranean fruit-fly,” then the
principal preoccupation of Florida citrus growers. But he was not happy
with the regime he was expected to follow. Though citrus diseases were
a serious matter, did they, he asked, really deserve “so much attention
from candidates for the highest temporal office on earth? Isn’t it time
we grew up?” I was disturbed by his depressed state of mind. The deg-
radation involved in primary campaigning was corroding his soul. He
was tired, plaintively querulous, and increasingly pessimistic.

He felt no qualms about running against Dwight Eisenhower, but to
be measured against Estes Kefauver was an insult. Some might write that
off as snobbism. Yet I remembered the reaction of Walter and Helen
Lippmann after they had spent an evening with the Kefauvers and their
friends; never had I seen them so angry and disgusted, repelled by the
squalor of a conversation laden with puerile obscenities and sniggering
innuendoes. Nonetheless, after his defeat in Minnesota and the general
falling away of support around the country, Stevenson had to pay
increasing attention to Kefauver at whatever cost to his self-esteem. And
there was no doubt that on some liberal issues Kefauver had shown con-
viction and courage.

Politicians, professors, and columnists constantly dredge up certain
favored historical precedents. The United States, they repeatedly aver,
should take major initiatives “like the Marshall Plan.” In political cam-
paigns, they nostalgically recall the Lincoln-Douglas debates. 1 he fact
that those debates did not have the effect ascribed to them does not
diminish the mythology, and in the age of television, when candidates
are measured more by personality than substance, the idea of letting
them slug it out in living color has wide appeal. We initially opposed this
suggestion in the Florida campaign but, after the loss in Minnesota, we
agreed under mounting pressures to a joint Stevenson-Kefauver tele-
vision appearance. How, we thought, could anyone fail to be impressed
by the contrast between an awkward prosaic Kefauver and our own elo-
quent tiger? Stevenson was a past master of the apt and eloquent phrase,

The 1956 Campaign and After 139

and his deep commitment to the public interest could not help but be
evident. Thus we finally agreed that, eight days before the Florida pri-
mary, on May 21, the two men should meet at a television studio in
Miami. Though I was less confident of the outcome than some of the
Stevenson entourage, I hoped that we might, indeed, gain a decisive
advantage. The debate — or, as we called it, the “discussion” — was to take
place on Monday, with Stevenson flying from California a few days in
advance to prepare for it.

Bill Blair, Stevenson’s personal assistant, telephoned me that the Gov-
ernor was exhausted and gloomy. Couldn’t I arrange a day of total
relaxation on a boat, where he could be away from all telephones? I scur-
ried around seeking a suitable vessel, and a campaign worker agreed to
borrow one from a friend. I specifically stipulated that the object was to
isolate Stevenson so we could brief him for the debate; we would, there-
fore, want no outsiders aboard. Stevenson grumbled, as usual, when I
reported our plans for the outing, but Bill Blair and I reassured him
that he would get a good rest and be able to concentrate quietly on the
debate.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. In spite of my stern
stipulations, the owner of the boat produced not only his wife but also
three or four other couples, intending to turn the trip into a floating
cocktail party. I heatedly remonstrated, but we did not want an awkward
incident that the press might exploit, so Blair and I persuaded Stevenson
to go aboard, on the promise that we would segregate him for our brief-
ing. Stevenson was, however, too annoyed to relax. Though Blair and I
kept him in the stern of the boat, the sound of revelry from the bow
grew louder and louder, and guests drifted back now and then to meet
the great man.

Stevenson, in his normal frame of mind, might have enjoyed the
absurdity of the situation, but he was tired and bitterly complaining that
he had not had time to prepare for the evening’s ordeal. That, however,
was not really the problem; although intellectually prepared he was both
physically and spiritually exhausted. Harry Ashmore, former editor of
the Arkansas Gazette , and Jim Finnegan, Stevenson’s campaign manager,
had spent two whole days going over a list of prospective questions with
him, and, in any event, the campaign had settled down to a half-dozen
stylized questions the press asked by rote.

Stevenson wanted a written text that would assure the eloquence of
phrase in which he took such pride. I unwisely discouraged him. The
public, I argued, wanted to hear him ad libbing, without benefit of script,
displaying full mastery of the issues. I had not foreseen that, in his
depressed and demoralized state, he could not give a brilliant perfor-
mance or persuade many voters.

The boat owner’s wife furnished the only comic relief of the after-

140 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

noon. After insisting that an impatient Stevenson make a tour of her
house a few hundred yards from the dock, she exhibited not merely the
central area but the “deduction wing,” where the family obviously lived.
“Why the ‘deduction’ wing?” Stevenson asked. The lady replied quite
innocently, “Oh, Jim keeps a few books and papers around there so he
can take it all off his income tax.” It was the kind of observation that
would normally have delighted Adlai, but that afternoon nothing could
make him laugh.

The much heralded television “discussion” proved not so much a
disaster as a bore. Fuzzy questions from a panel of local reporters evoked
fuzzy banalities about foreign policy, then each candidate avowed his
ardor for civil rights. Stevenson was thrown off balance at the outset,
when, after he had extemporized some opening remarks, Kefauver read
from a written statement. He was equally annoyed at the end, when
Kefauver produced another text. Since that was what Stevenson would
have done had Blair and I not discouraged him, he was furious. “You
left me naked! My God,” he complained, “what a humiliation when I
can’t even show up a fourth-rate hack like Kefauver! I should have had
a beautifully written final statement and electrified the country with some
blinding oratory!”

Eight days later, Stevenson won the primary by a mere twelve thou-
sand votes, with the Panhandle’s wool-hat segregationists providing the
winning margin. Feeble though it was, the victory at least saved him
from a defeat that — following Minnesota — would have seriously preju-
diced his candidacy. A California victory in early June virtually sewed
up the convention.

Had Stevenson spent the first six months of 1956 on a world trip, he
would have been physically and morally prepared for a hard campaign,
since travel stimulated him. But then the nomination might have gone
to Kefauver by default. As it was, the primaries destroyed his elan and
resilience. No longer was he a confident, ebullient candidate; the quer-
ulous note was heard far too often as he looked toward the impending
campaign as an ordeal rather than an opportunity.

The Convention

At the convention, Senator John F. Kennedy nominated Stevenson,
who won on the first ballot; we then found ourselves arguing as to who
should run for Vice-President: Kefauver, Humphrey, or Kennedy? An
untried alternative was to disregard the tradition that the Presidential
candidate select his own running mate, and throw the Vice-Presidential
nomination open to the convention. Not only would that save Stevenson
the necessity of a bruising choice, it might demonstrate a commitment
to open democracy, which was, we felt, one of our candidate’s leading

The 1956 Campaign and After 14 1

assets. Eisenhower had just “dictated” the nomination of Richard M.
Nixon; we hoped to dramatize the contrast. But we had not reckoned
on the pols; Sam Rayburn, Paul Butler, the new Democratic national
chairman, and Lyndon Johnson all opposed the idea.

No decision had been made by Thursday morning, the day before
the assembled Democrats habitually nominated their Vice-Presidential
candidate. Several of us drifted over to Stevenson’s law office, where he
was working on his acceptance speech, and once again debated the
arguments for and against an open convention. Wyatt and I spoke for it
vigorously, strongly assisted by Jim Finnegan. Stevenson finally decided
that, while risky, it was still the best course for him to follow — besides,
the idea appealed to him intellectually. Late that night, we all went to
the Stockyards Inn, next door to the convention hall. There, Stevenson
had another battle with the pols, most of whom opposed an open con-
vention. One reason for their opposition, implied if not always stated,
was their ingrained conservatism; like Jean Monnet’s grandfather, the
professionals automatically regarded any new idea as presumptively bad.
An open convention was, they thought, a reckless heresy, since the art
of politics depended on rigidly controlling the electoral environment.

An open Vice-Presidential contest might choose Kefauver, whom most
of the party notables widely despised. They also feared that Stevenson’s
refusal to pick his own Vice-Presidential running mate would be attacked
as further proof of his indecisiveness. Less complicated than Adlai, the
pros tended to see everything in terms of a straightforward choice;
indecisiveness, like innovation, was sin. In the end, Stevenson held firm
with a strong assist from Jim Finnegan.

Unlike several of the pols, Adlai had thought that in an open conven-
tion Kennedy would probably win. Kennedy, he thought, had quality;
he would have been far more comfortable running with him than with
Kefauver, even though he sometimes lamented that “Jack [had] too much
of his father in him.” Adlai had shown his friendship by asking Kennedy
to nominate him, and he was clearly disappointed when Kefauver won
the Vice-Presidential race in the open convention. That race provided
the one element of drama in an otherwise dreary convention. I thought
Kennedy had gained the day when he was only eighteen and a half votes
short of the number needed, but when Missouri shifted to Kefauver, it
started an inexorable swing. In his shirt sleeves, with his collar unbut-
toned and looking boyishly handsome though breathless, Kennedy made
a gallant, impromptu speech for the ticket, ending with the traditional
motion that Kefauver’s nomination be made unanimous. Overnight he
was a television hero — a charismatic leader.

Kennedy, so subsequent history suggests, was probably lucky not to
win, for he emerged a national hero untarnished by running against an
unbeatable general and by Stevenson’s lackluster campaign. That, how-

142 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

ever, was not the mood of the moment; instead, the Kennedy family was
angry and bitter. Jack got over it quickly, but Bobby — always the better
hater — continued to blame David Lawrence, the politically potent Mayor
of Pittsburgh, who was one of Stevenson’s staunchest supporters. Law-
rence, Bobby claimed, had double-crossed the Kennedys by switching
Pennsylvania to the Kefauver side, and there were even insinuations that
Stevenson (or at least Jim Finnegan) had played some role in it.

Once the ticket was completed, the only remaining convention busi-
ness of consequence was Stevenson’s acceptance speech. I had seen Ste-
venson’s version of the speech early in the afternoon; Tom Finletter,
Carl McGowan, and I had worked over it with growing disappointment.
But when Willard Wirtz, then Stevenson’s chief assistant, took our ver-
sion to the Governor, he did not put up a fight for the changes we had
recommended, and Stevenson brushed aside our suggestions, which, as
I recall, were mostly deletions. It was a bad decision, for after the drama
of the afternoon, his acceptance speech seemed a pale reflection of his
earlier oratory — largely a compendium of phrases fresh when first
uttered but drained of meaning by repetition — the speech of a man who,
for the time being at least, had lost his spark. Those of us devoted to his
cause felt enormously let down.

The Campaign as Television Farce

Stevenson’s first need after the convention was for an effective cam-
paign organization. During the primary period, Jim Finnegan, though
campaign manager, had operated with only a small staff. Effective on
his home terrain of Philadelphia, he was not used to working with the
amateurs who formed the Stevenson entourage; at the same time, he
stood in excessive awe of Stevenson himself . During the 1952 campaign,
I had worked easily with Wilson Wyatt, Carl McGowan, Bill Blair, and
Adlai’s personal circle, but my relations were not so easy with Willard
Wirtz, who had taken over McGowan’s role, nor with some of the younger
speech writers, such as Robert Tufts, a young professor from Oberlin
College.

Whether for that reason or others that I do not know, Stevenson did
not ask me to travel with him but, rather, to take on the task of director
of public relations. There was no logic in the assignment other than the
fact that Adlai trusted my judgment in dealing with the press and other
media. I had no background or experience for the job. I had never been
a journalist or advertising executive, and it was not an assignment I
wanted in any way. Nevertheless, I set myself up in the campaign head-
quarters in Washington and worked out an uneasy relationship with our
advertising agency — Norman, Craig and Kummel — and particularly with
Gene Kummel, who was tolerant of my professional ignorance. I had
neither taste nor talent for my most important task, which was to fight

The 1956 Campaign and After 143

with the television networks. I would have been completely useless but
loi the assistance of our time-buyer, Reggie Shuebel — a remarkable
woman of great experience, enormous drive, and unquenchable good
humor. Most television entertainment bored me, and I regularly watched
only the news broadcasts. I was, therefore, astonished to discover how
many changes had taken place in the viewing habits of Americans in the
four years since the first Stevenson campaign. That campaign, as I have
mentioned, was the first one in which television was widely employed;
and it was also the last and only time any candidate used it for a system-
atic ailing of his views. In 1952, we had thought of television primarily
as a means for letting a larger nationwide audience listen to our candi-
date s speeches. But by 1956, 73 percent of American households had
television sets, and attention spans had so dramatically shortened that,
according to my television advisers, only a tiny fraction of the American
public would willingly sit through a half-hour speech. Moreover, we could
no longer afford such a luxury, for the cost of a network half-hour on
prime time had risen exorbitantly. Whether we liked it or not, we would
have to resort to the use of the spots; and even a network spot no longer
than a hiccup stretched our meager resources.

Stevenson would, 1 knew, be repelled by the idea of using thirty-
second, or even one-minute, spots with only a scattered handful of
nationally televised half-hour speeches. He still sincerely believed that a
campaign should be used to educate people, not narcotize them by an
endless succession of asinine political commercials. Spots could not con-
vey ideas, only create fleeting artificial impressions— thus putting a pre-
mium on manner and personality. “Sooner or later,” I predicted in an
informal speech in New York, “Presidential campaigns would have
professional actors as candidates who could speak the lines.” I did not
know how presciently I spoke.

In view of some comments four years earlier, I found our need to
resort to spots particularly humiliating. During the early days of the 1952
campaign, someone had obtained a bootlegged outline of a proposal
piepaied lot Eisenhower by a New York advertising agency for a blitz
campaign of television spots that would be used for saturation effect
during the immediate pre-election period. At a meeting of Stevenson
followers in Springfield on October 1, 1952, 1 had made a satirical speech,
attacking Eisenhower as a synthetic candidate and using the projected
spot campaign as the principal subject of ridicule. Eisenhower, I had
pointed out, was being merchandised like soap, or soup, or some other
kitchen or bathroom commodity, and I referred to his electoral efforts
as “the cornflakes campaign.” My argument was straightforward.

In the sale of soap and toothpastes, the saturation of the mind by contrived
gimmicks and ear-dinning repetition has become an accepted though painful
pait of everyday American life. But in the sale of political candidates and ide-

*44

Adlai Stevenson and Politics

ologies it has its obvious — and proven — dangers. We need not, however, go into
that. I think we should hope that Americans, no matter how they determine
their choice of cigarettes or chewing gum, are wise enough to realize that they
must apply different standards in choosing a political philosophy to live by or
men to lead them.

The tyrant, Commodus, in his vanity, ordered the heads chopped off every
statue of Hercules in Rome and a reproduction of his own head substituted.
Even the most ignorant Romans were not fooled, of course. Hercules ultimately
got his head back; Commodus lost his. I do not mean to liken the General to
Commodus; but I do suggest that even Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne
will not be able to make him look like Hercules.

My speech received a good deal of press notice, with the veteran
conservative political writer Frank Kent devoting several columns to “Mr.
Ball’s Bellowing.” But it did not deter Eisenhower’s spot campaign, which
proved effective (so the experts decreed, though they could offer no
proof). Ike had spent long hours before the cameras giving pat answers
to banal questions from actors selected to represent diverse special inter-
ests. The spots had been selectively shown to take account of regional
differences, and different answers were beamed to different localities.

Though my “cornflakes” speech reflected my repugnance at the
Eisenhower spot campaign, I had not yet grasped the full implications
of this new threat to the democratic process. I did not then comprehend
the extent to which Presidential candidates would thereafter be pre-
sented as commodities, market-tested and packaged to satisfy individual
markets. That meant the attrition of serious dialogue. The message to
be conveyed was now stylized; two days after voting for a particular can-
didate, the voter’s hemorrhoids would be miraculously cured. By 1956,
that mythology had become dogma; most of our limited funds must, the
pols assured me, be spent on saturating the networks.

Of course, the concept of canned commercials disgusted Adlai. Only
the pressure of the pols persuaded him to film a few spots to be used
toward the end of the campaign. It was an art form for which he had
neither liking nor facility. Stevenson was a poor actor and refused to
learn set answers, so he needed a great many expensive retakes to fit his
words to the Procrustean time limit. Even then, the spots were stiff and
unconvincing. Edward R. Murrow, who strongly supported Adlai, vol-
unteered to teach him to perform more effectively. He arranged for a
studio, and, after a hassle, I persuaded Stevenson to cooperate. Murrow
spent a long afternoon of patient coaching, but it did no good. In spite
of his friendship with and admiration for Murrow, Stevenson hated the
whole exercise and did not conceal his distaste; he even chided me about
the expense of the studio.

I will not repeat the sad chronicle of the 1956 campaign. For me, as
for many who loved Adlai, it was a prolonged, dismal anticlimax. Man-

The 1956 Campaign and After 145

agement of the campaign was now— up to a point— in the hands of
professionals, which deprived it of the charm of improvisation. Worst of
all, our candidate had exhausted himself in three stultifying primaries.
On many substantive issues— fiscal policy, farm policy, social legislation,
and much else — Adlai was more specific and competent in 1956 than he
had been four years earlier. The position papers released during the
campaign were models of analysis and lucidity; the Finletter exercise
had paid off. But Adlai’s speeches lacked the same eloquence and drama
that he had once demonstrated, and the country did not listen.

As has now become customary in political campaigns, the newspa-
pers concentrated on beating to death two or three “issues” until the
whole campaign became little more than a monotonous variation on a
few largely irrelevant themes. In a well-orchestrated campaign, the can-
didate hammers on the points he can handle most advantageously, but
our 1956 campaign was anything but well orchestrated.

The Accidental Issues

Oddly enough, Stevenson’s proposal for an end to nuclear bomb
testing attracted little comment when Adlai first made it and would have
been forgotten had he not returned to it on September 5, during the
campaign. Here he violated the rules of prudence; he failed to articulate
his nuclear proposal in a clear and definitive way and he coupled it in
the same speech with the equally explosive proposal that America aban-
don the draft and develop a volunteer army.

The launching of any new idea in a political campaign calls for cer-
tain minimum precautions. It should, first of all, be vetted by experts
familiar with its pitfalls, political as well as technical, thus revealing
whether or not the idea is sound and politically sustainable. Adlai should
have presented the proposal in a carefully drafted text containing the
arguments and information necessary to anticipate and counter the
attacks of the opposition. In addition, before the unveiling, we should
have lined up recognized experts primed to express prompt and enthu-
siastic public approval.

Now all such precautions were ignored. Stevenson had never studied
the bomb-testing issue deeply; instead, he relied principally on conver-
sation and correspondence with friends who were themselves only mod-
estly acquainted with the technical questions involved. Other than
Thomas E. Murray, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, no
one thoioughly familiar with the esoteric problems of verification had
ever seen the proposal; it was not an area in which Stevenson had any
peisonal experience and he never made it quite clear what he was pro-
posing. In his original speech to the American Society of Newspaper
Editors, he had, in the final draft, dropped out any reference to a prior

146 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

agreement with the Soviet Union for a cessation of bomb testing, pro-
posing instead that the United States act on its own and resume tests
only if the Soviets continued to test. “I would call upon other nations,”
he said, “the Soviet Union, to follow our lead, and if they don’t and
persist in further tests we will know about it and can reconsider our
policy.” 1 Then in his speech to the American Legion in Los Angeles on
September 5, after the campaign had started, he spoke about his “pro-
posal asking to halt further testing of large nuclear devices, conditioned
upon adherence by the other atomic powers to a similar policy.” Later,
on September 29, he referred to it as “a moratorium on the testing of
more super H-bombs. If the Russians don’t go along — well, at least the
world will know we tried. And we will know if they don’t because we can
detect H-bomb explosions without inspections.” 2

Those who argue — as some of Adlai’s supporters did after the cam-
paign — that, like the proposal of a volunteer army, Stevenson’s proposal
for a test-ban moratorium is vindicated by its ultimate adoption by a later
administration, are on unsound ground. The partial test-ban agreement
concluded by President Kennedy on July 25, 1963, was a formal treaty
binding all the parties (the United States, the USSR, and Great Britain)
to abjure only from those tests that could be detected by national means —
or, in other words, without on-the-spot inspection. Adlai’s proposal was
that the United States stop bomb tests unilaterally, then reconsider if the
Soviets failed to follow suit. Nor did Adlai adequately deal with the ver-
ification issue. In the beginning, he talked about the cessation of all H-
bomb tests, stating categorically that all such tests could be detected by
national means. Later, in a nationwide television speech in Chicago over
the weekend of October 25, he referred to his earlier proposal as one to
“halt further tests of large-sized nuclear weapons — what we usually call
the H-bombs”; we could, he argued, “detect any large explosions any-
where” and could continue to develop and test “smaller nuclear weap-

iii

ons.

Stationed as I was in the East, I could only telephone my dismay at
these goings-on. But I watched with sinking heart as Stevenson, having
impetuously proposed a unilateral cessation of testing, searched franti-
cally for a defensible fail-back line by putting the emphasis not on dis-
armament but on the dangers to American health from bomb tests that
resulted in nuclear fallout which contained Strontium 90. Though I
thought the new argument overstated and insupportable, I did what I
could to reinforce it, enlisting Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famous baby
specialist, to announce that increasing Strontium 90 in the atmosphere
could prove fatal for infants. I also collected statements and testimonials
from liberal physicists and chemists all over the country.

Meanwhile, Stevenson was being induced by the speech writers on
his plane to embellish his disintegrating case with increasingly insup-

The 1956 Campaign and After 14J

portable assertions. In a Chicago speech, he said, “With every explosion
of a super bomb, large quantities of radioactive materials are pumped
into the air currents of the world at all altitudes — later to fall to earth as
dust or in rain. This radioactive ‘fallout’ carries something called Stron-
tium 90, which is the most dreadful poison in the world. Only a table-
spoon shared with all the members of the human race would produce a
dangerous level of radioactivity in the bones of every individual. In suf-
ficient concentration it can cause bone cancer and dangerously affect
reproductive processes. ... I do not wish to be an alarmist and I am not
asserting that the present levels of radioactivity are dangerous. Scientists
do not know exactly how dangerous the threat is.’’ 4

Hyperbole was piled on hyperbole as a beleaguered Stevenson found
himself under increasing attack — to the point where he finally charged
the Administration with concealing the fact that Strontium 90 was already
contaminating the country’s milk supply. The campaign reached the
ultimate level of silliness when Kefauver declared that hydrogen bombs
could “right now blow the earth off its axis by 16 degrees, which would
affect the seasons.”

As Stevenson was pushed more and more onto weaker ground, I
grew increasingly frustrated. Finally, I demanded and obtained a prom-
ise from those on the plane that Stevenson would say nothing more on
the subject until I could put together a reasoned position paper. I gath-
ered about me in New York the most authoritative experts I could
mobilize, cross-examining a stream of them in constant session over two
days and nights and growing increasingly appalled by the drastic and
complicated qualifications needed to defend Stevenson’s position. In the
end, I produced a careful — and coherent — paper that set forth the max-
imum position that could be rationally defended.

Then, in the early morning hours of October 27, I flew to the West
Coast to meet Stevenson’s plane and give him the position paper. After
returning to New York, I awaited its issuance, but nothing appeared
until October 29, two days later. I found — to my anger and dismay —
that the staff on the plane had rewritten it, putting back the clearly
insupportable overstatements. All my lost sleep and frantic effort had
achieved nothing, while Adlai’s increasingly extravagant pronounce-
ments alienated an even larger number of his better informed support-
ers.

Nor was Stevenson’s proposal on September 5— that we end the draft
and substitute a volunteer army — handled any more adroitly. A respect-
able argument could have been made for it, and it then had some built-
in bipartisan backing, though, since adoption by the Nixon Administra-
tion in 1972, it has proved disastrous. We had discussed it in a desultory
way, and I had even speculated to Stevenson that Eisenhower might seek
to match his politically effective declaration “I will go to Korea” with a

148 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

surprise declaration that he was ending the draft and creating a volun-
teer army. Stevenson was badly positioned to put forward the volunteer
army proposal. Though the country might have welcomed the proposal
had Eisenhower offered it, who would accept Stevenson’s civilian opin-
ion on a military issue against that of our most famous general? Steven-
son’s mistake of strategy was fundamental. Instead of continuing to talk
about domestic issues on which the Eisenhower Administration was vul-
nerable and the President an amateur, he tried to tackle the President
on the issues of war and peace where a military leader had an over-
whelming advantage. Again, he was heavily influenced by his own per-
sonal following. Adulatory friends were urging him to take the high road
and educate people on cosmic questions, while scolding him for attack-
ing on domestic issues. 5 Moreover, he loved the great generalities of
foreign policy, delighting, as James Reston once wrote of another states-
man, in “flinging continents about.”

Ike was known for his good luck, and, in the end, history played into
his hands. On October 29, Israel invaded the Sinai, and two days later
England and France attacked at Suez. Major world crises necessarily work
to the advantage of an incumbent President — particularly a military man
thought capable of protecting American interests. The Suez crisis gave
Ike the chance to show he was in charge. He made (without having to
buy network time) a major nationwide address, reporting to the people
as “your President,” and not as a political candidate. In my capacity as
Stevenson’s director of public relations, I argued frantically with the net-
works to secure equal time. All three networks referred the matter to
the Federal Communications Commission, which finally granted the time.
Just then the Russians moved into Budapest to crush the Hungarian
revolt. Eisenhower could not have arranged a better atmosphere for the
election, and the vote showed it.

On election eve, I flew back from Boston to Chicago with Adlai. In
the Blackstone Hotel we heard the bitter news. The Suez affair and the
Hungarian revolt served at least one purpose: they provided Stevenson
an excuse for losing — though I never doubted we would have lost any-
way.

Post-Campaign Anticlimax

The readjustment after an unsuccessful campaign is difficult not only
for the candidate, but painful as well for those who have worked closely
with him. Since this was the second time around for me, I was becoming
an expert at recuperating from unsuccessful political ventures. Once
again, I had to reestablish my law practice, which 1 had all but aban-
doned for almost seven months. Adlai took a long vacation in the spring
of 1957 and thereafter went of f to England, where in May he received

The 1956 Campaign and After 149

an honorary degree from Oxford and a tumultuous ovation from the
undergraduates. From there he paid a short visit to Africa on behalf of
various legal clients.

He returned more preoccupied than ever with the central impor-
tance of raising living standards in the Third World. It had, in fact,
become an almost obsessive theme: “great wealth and great poverty can-
not exist safely side-by-side indefinitely.” Yet, though proclaiming the
projected ending of the age of colonialism, he was opposed to radical
solutions. When the young Senator John F. Kennedy made a widely noted
speech attacking French policy in Algeria, Adlai described it to me as “a
great mistake.” Precipitate independence, he argued, would create only
chaos and bloodshed.

In October 1957, Adlai called me to say that Secretary Dulles had
asked him to spend six weeks in the State Department helping to pre-
pare the NATO Summit Conference scheduled for December in Paris.
Could I help him? He arrived in Washington on October 30, spent the
evening talking with Dulles, and called me the following morning. He
was ambivalent as to whether to accept Dulles’s invitation. Dulles had
proposed that Adlai be appointed a special assistant to the President,
with an office in the State Department. He would devote most of his time
for the rest of the year to developing a United States position paper on
points that had been covered in a recent communique between Eisen-
hower and Macmillan. Then he would participate in presenting the
position to the North Atlantic Council in December. Dulles envisaged a
wide-ranging assignment; Stevenson would be expected to coordinate
the American position with the principal allies and to drum up support
from Congress and the American public.

Should Adlai undertake the assignment, or shouldn’t he? Over the
weekend, he and I went back and forth on the issue; Stevenson also
talked to Tom Finletter and Lloyd Garrison. If he took it on, he would
want me to work directly with him. Could I spare the time? Yes, I said,
but meanwhile he ought to stop agonizing. He should either accept
Dulles’s invitation or flatly refuse it. But I knew Stevenson would never
let it go at that; his instinct was for the dusty answer. So he told Dulles
that the problems involved in drawing up the position paper were too
complex for him to prepare it in time for the NATO meeting. Anyway,
the formulation of policy was the responsibility of the President and
Dulles and not of an opposition leader. Still, he would be willing to review
and discuss the American position before it was put in final form and to
do such missionary work as might be useful, even going to Europe as a
“special envoy of the President.”

Inevitably, the matter leaked to the press, compelling Stevenson to
issue a statement, since nothing had yet been publicly said by the White
House. I hough I was interested in, and was currently familiar with,

i jo Adlai Stevenson and Politics

European political attitudes, I was exasperated with Stevenson’s refusal
to make up his mind. I was quite prepared to drop my law practice for
a few months to help out, but I insisted that my role be approved by
Dulles, particularly as I would need appropriate clearance even to see
the relevant documents.

Stevenson talked to Dulles about me but met with resistance. Why
wouldn’t Stevenson be content with the assistants assigned to him from
the State and Defense Departments? George Ball, Dulles said, was not
cleared, and that process would take too long, The result was a messy
compromise. I would assist Stevenson — but secretly. Since I could not go
to the State Department to work with him there, every evening Steven-
son would carry out the classified papers so he and I could review and
revise them during the evening at the Georgetown house where he was
staying. Then a messenger would call for the papers and take them back
to the State Department.

More worrisome to me than these clumsy arrangements, however,
was Stevenson’s attitude toward the problems under consideration. He
had long since lost interest in NATO; it was, he insisted, a purely mili-
tary collective security system among the Western powers, and more and
more he thought of foreign policy almost exclusively in terms of 1 hire!
World relationships. Stevenson refused to regard as important the main
problem to be faced in the NATO conference: the relation of France to
the nuclear issue.

Nor was I happy with his endless conversations with a wide circle of
his followers who had had some experience with foreign policy but were,
for the most part, unfamiliar with the issues outlined in the Eisenhower-
Macmillan communique and had out-of-date information in many other
areas as well. Even Dean Rusk, whom 1 met for the first time in this
context, wanted to discuss Third World problems that were, I thought,
relevant to his work on the Rockefeller Foundation but quite irrelevant
to the NATO meeting. Under the circumstances, I urged Adlai to tell
Dulles frankly that we lacked sufficient time to develop “definitive ideas”
and warn him against going forward with the NATO meeting without
adequate consultation with the Congress.

Tom Finletter had prepared a useful paper on the NA TO problems,
including such matters as placing missiles in Europe. Finletter came to
Washington, and he and I drafted a report that Stevenson could give to
Dulles, reflecting his reaction to staff papers on NATO prepared by the
State Department. But Stevenson had little sympathy for our ideas. His
main concern was to include in the paper a strong plea that the United
States should lead the “capitalist countries in speeding the development
of the under-developed nations.” Furthermore, the State Department
papers did not, in Stevenson’s view, include enough emphasis on disar-
mament. Dulles replied in a guarded fashion, pointing out that such

The 1956 Campaign and After 151

questions as Third World development would not come up at the
December meeting. Meanwhile, Stevenson privately told several of his
friends in the press that the Paris meeting “must transcend the current
obsession of Washington and London with missiles, rockets, and weapon
systems.”

It was a disappointing episode. Adlai’s interest was in grand concepts
and uplifting sentiments, and he was impatient with the practical issues
then seriously troubling the Western Alliance. Moreover, he was uncom-
fortable to be working with Dulles and seemed quite properly concerned
by the possible effect of collaboration on his public stance as leader of
the Democratic opposition. The more he reflected on the assignment,
the more awkward he felt. That is why he did not want to go to Paris: he
did not relish being in the shadow of Eisenhower, or even of Dulles — a
position I could well understand.

Nor did he try to conceal his boredom with the issues of nuclear
defense, all of which he made crystal clear when, on December 6, in
writing a critique of the draft of President Eisenhower’s statement to
NATO, he insisted, against my strong objection, on including the follow-
ing statement: “I wish the President in his speech could loudly declare
that he thinks NATO has a larger purpose than defense; that its purpose
is peace and progress; that, as free nations have gathered together to
protect themselves, they should also mobilize their resources and skills
to help the less fortunate in the human family to advance; that, in this
shrinking world, as in our communities, the rich must help the poor;
and that this is a higher, better goal for NATO than the accumulation
of nuclear weapons, however necessary.” I * * * * 6

I will have more to say of Adlai in later chapters, but this seems a

good point for a summing up. After all, his two campaigns for the Pres-

idency — and particularly the hrst — were the golden years. All that
occurred later was anticlimax.

I he debt of gratitude I owe Adlai clearly emerges from the events I

have recounted. He was for over three decades a sound counsellor; it
was he more than anyone else who was responsible for my six years in
the State Department — the most rewarding years of my life. I loved and
admired Adlai, and if, in the course of this book, I may point out some
of his imperfections, or, at least, eccentricities, it is because I do not like
retouched photographs. No one ever had a better friend than Adlai Ste-
venson— he was unfailingly kind, thoughtful, and steadfast — or a better
companion, for he was both wise and witty, with a deep reservoir of
anecdote and experience on which he drew to everyone’s delight. Nor
has America often had so dedicated a leader, able to stir the imagination
of thousands and restore thought and civility to the national discourse.

On July 14, 1965, I was returning on a commercial flight from a

152 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

meeting of NATO in Paris. Halfway across the ocean, the captain brought
me a message from the White House: “Governor Stevenson has just died
in London and the President wants you to fly there with the Vice-Presi-
dent and bring back his body. A plane will be waiting when you reach
Washington.” In London the next morning, I saw several of Adlai’s old
friends and was made aware that the affection he enjoyed was not defined
by national borders. Later I attended a memorial service in the Washing-
ton Cathedral, where Carl McGowan paid a moving eulogy. When I left
the church, President Johnson was just getting into his limousine. He
called to me and, with a comforting hand on my shoulder, said, “George,
I never trust a man who can’t cry for a friend.” I had hoped that no one
had noticed my tears, but the following week I found them recorded in
a Life Magazine picture.

It has now been a quarter of a century since the failure of Adlai’s
second campaign, and during that time many have asked, “Would Ste-
venson have made a good president?” No one can answer such a ques-
tion categorically. Every vote is an act of faith, for no one can ever foretell
exactly how well any individual will perform under the strains and agon-
ies of the Oval Office. So I can reply only for myself, “Yes, he could have
been a great President.”

The charge most often made against him is that he lacked decisive-
ness. As the previous pages have shown, that accusation cannot be totally
ignored. But the instances of indecision I observed almost all involved
questions of his own advancement or the promotion of his own interest;
his hesitancy, in my view, resulted largely from his sense of style and
abhorrence at pushing himself forward. On issues of principle, he stood
firm — even when the costs were predictable and high. There is no evi-
dence that he was indecisive as Governor of Illinois. On the contrary, he
made a distinguished record, launching new initiatives, tidying up the
state’s finances, and dealing adroitly with the legislature. He was liked
and respected, even revered, and his leadership was followed. As Presi-
dent, he would have given dignity to America, improved the moral and
intellectual tone, and, in my view, led the country steadily and well.

Unhappily — for him and for America — he never had the chance to
prove it.

II. The French Crisis and Stevenson
Again ( 1958 - 19 61 )

For many years, I shuttled to Paris almost every month until
by i960 I had made over one hundred round-trip crossings. I watched
with fascination as France engaged in its reluctant and painlul retreat

The French Crisis and Stevenson Again (1958-1961) 155

from empire: from Indochina, then Tunisia and Morocco; until finally —
to the amazement of many of my French friends — even Algeria was
threatened. I discussed the problem incessantly with a wide spectrum of
Frenchmen— ranging from the philosopher and journalist Raymond
Aron to acquaintances in French government and industry. As might
be expected, my clients, the French Patronat, adopted the most obdu-
rate position.

Why, they asked, was my country so intent on dislodging France from
its colonial holdings — why, as they saw it, did Washington show such a
lack of appreciation for all that France had done and was doing for the
indigenes in her overseas territories? Could we not understand why Paris
must take drastic action to check the nationalist frenzy that, they con-
tended, would condemn the natives overseas (who were legally citizens
of France) to a premature and disastrous independence?

To convert me to their point of view, they exposed me to the lead-
ers — both military and civilian — who were trying to fight off the Viet
Minh in Indochina. From them I learned about France’s frustrations in
fighting “la guerre sale.” Not only was the terrain of Indochina clearly
unfit for the type of warfare France’s seasoned overseas troops had been
trained to fight, but the irrational willingness of the Viet Minh to take
staggering losses made them an unconquerable adversary. I was to think
of this often nine years later, when America compulsively repeated all
of France’s mistakes on the same hostile terrain and against essentially
the same enemy. The French disclosed the same propensity for self-
deception, seduced by the same self-serving arguments that were later
to lead my countrymen astray; they even comforted themselves with the
same statistics of kill ratios and body counts that Americans were to recite
with such macabre assurance during the middle 1960s. Just as the
American civilian and military leaders were later to concoct new sure-
fire ways to win the war, so the French periodically announced new tac-
tical schemes — the Navarre Plan, the Salan Plan, the Leclerc Plan, and
the de Lattre de Tassigny Plan — that would magically assure victory in a
short period.

Visit to the Maghreb

But none of those schemes worked, and by 1954, grieved as they
were by the loss of Indochina, the French were facing mounting threats
to areas that concerned them even more — their possessions in the Magh-
reb: I unisia, Morocco, and Algeria. I made no secret of my belief that
they would ultimately have to give up those territories. They, in turn,
tried hard to educate me in the mystique of “assimilation” and “identity”
and the idealistic concepts of Marshal Louis Lyautey. I could only
understand French policy in North Africa, they contended, by viewing
operations on the spot. So when Ruth and I were in Paris in January

1 54 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

1953, the Patronat proposed that we make a tour of North Africa at
their expense. I accepted the invitation but only with the stipulation that
I be permitted to talk to all sides — the Nationalist groups as well as French
officials and leaders of the French communities. Ruth and I spent two
weeks in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco — our schedules tightly filled with
interviews and sightseeing. The Patronat kept their word that I could
listen to both sides of the case, arranging meetings for me with represen-
tatives of the Neo-Destour in Tunisia, the FLN in Algeria, and the Istiqlal
in Morocco.

On my return, my clients no doubt expected me to provide a report
they could use to help persuade Americans that their cause was righ-
teous. But the trip only confirmed my conviction that the French were
pushing against the tide of history. Though they might be able to post-
pone coming to grips with their predicament for a limited period, sooner
or later their time would run out in the Maghreb. Since I saw no point
in rewarding their hospitality by a disquieting report that would stir
resentments but make no converts, I followed the unheroic course of
thanking them for the trip but writing nothing.

Algeria in Flames

In confirmation of even my most pessimistic predictions, the French
were able to buy very little time. Faced with mounting insurrections
throughout North Africa and wishing to avoid simultaneous rebellion in
all three territories, the leaders of the Fourth Republic allowed both
Tunisia and Morocco to become sovereign states in 1956 so they could
concentrate on maintaining their position in Algeria. But it was only
throwing babies to the wolves; less than two years after our visit, long-
simmering rebellion broke out and, by 1958, France had deployed more
than 500,000 soldiers in Algeria — as large as our later deployment in
Vietnam and the greatest overseas expeditionary force in French his-
tory. It was a rearguard action, fought with emotion and cruelty on both
sides. Unlike Morocco, Algeria was not a recent French acquisition. The
French had controlled the area since 1830 and, unlike British India,
where there were fewer than 50,000 British civil servants and commer-
cial representatives out of a total population of almost 400 million, at
least 1,200,000 people in Algeria thought of themselves as French —
although many, and perhaps most, were of Spanish or Mediterranean
origin. French colons and their families, many of whom had lived in
Algeria for five or six generations, dominated its economic life. But since
the natives (the indigenes) outnumbered them eight to one, the colons
feared — not without reason — that in an independent Algeria, they would,
as they expressed it macabrely, be forced, to choose between “the ship
and the coffin.”

The French Crisis and Stevenson Again (1958—1961) 755

Nationalist sentiment had been stimulated during World War II,
particularly by America’s doctrinal advocacy of self-determination, and,
once that war ended, a number of bloody incidents occurred. Though
France grudgingly conceded the Muslims a small amount of political
power, little came of it, and in 1954 the revolt began to spread over the
country. By 1956, the FLN had gained the support of virtually all of the
Algerian nationalists. They had occupied a great part of the countryside
and were conducting terrorist attacks in the cities. The French had
responded by committing massive forces and building electrified fences
along Algeria’s borders with Morocco and Tunisia. They even crossed
over onto Tunisian territory to destroy sanctuaries just as we were later
to invade Cambodia.

When Mendes-France extricated France from Indochina and Paris
granted independence to Tunisia and Morocco, the colons as well as ele-
ments of the French army developed a neurotic fear that a weak Fourth
Republic government might betray them by negotiating a craven settle-
ment. In November 1957, Felix Gaillard, who had been Jean Monnet’s
chef de cabinet during my French Supply Council days in Washington,
became Prime Minister and remained in that post until April of the fol-
lowing year. I visited him several times during that stormy period. The
French attack on the Tunisian village of Sakiet, which served as a sanc-
tuary for Algerian rebels, had incited the Tunisian government to retal-
iate by blockading 15,000 French soldiers at Bizerte. A British and
American offer of good offices to help settle the dispute only revived
latent suspicion that the United States sought to internationalize the
Algerian conflict as a prelude to Algerian independence.

In April 1958, a sudden freshet of anti-Americanism washed away
the Gaillard government and, following a protracted crisis, a right-wing
army revolt broke out in Algeria. For the moment, France seemed
threatened by attack from its own forces in Algeria, much as Spain had
been attacked by General Franco’s African legions twenty-two years ear-
lier. Since I was in and out of Paris constantly during the period, I shared
the general excitement, momentarily expecting a military coup and
watching with my friends for an airdrop in the Place de la Concorde. In
those anxious hours, the depression that had haunted me eighteen years
before returned in full measure. What might befall France under a new
and brutal Fascism?

The General on the White Horse

Thus, I was vastly relieved when, on May 16, de Gaulle broke his
long silence from Colombey to announce that he was ready to “assume
the power of the Republic.” After a period of intense and confused
maneuvering, that event Anally took place on May 27, 1958.

1^6 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

Returning to the United States late in June, I analyzed the prevailing
French malaise in a speech before the New York State Bar Association
Convention at Saranac on June 28, pointing out that since 1946, France
had been constantly at war overseas — first in Indochina, then Morocco
and Tunisia, and now Algeria. These King Canute struggles to turn back
giant waves of nationalism beating against weakened colonial structures
had left a deep mark on the French armed forces. Their disenchantment
had begun in 1940, when, though miserably led and finally overcome by
the Nazi blitzkrieg, many army units had fought bravely and well. None-
theless, the army had emerged not only discredited but overshadowed
in public esteem by the largely nonprofessional Resistance forces. Thus,
in postwar France, the proud officer from St. Cyr learned from a succes-
sion of small humiliations that he had lost his status. No longer did the
French bourgeois mother concentrate her formidable energies on mar-
rying off her daughter to the bedazzling young lieutenant; army pay had
not kept pace with increases in the pay even of civil servants.

This loss of social status as well as the inflated cost of living had, I
pointed out, led army officers to connive for posts in North Africa and
in other French possessions. In those posts, they had lived in style as the
dominant force in the local society. Unappreciated at home, they had
found a psychically satisfying life in farflung outposts of the empire. It
was a contradiction that bred resentment and suspicion of the politicians
who treated them shabbily. After Dien Bien Phu, when sixteen thousand
of the army’s best troops were trapped in a jungle fortress, the politicians
had loudly blamed military incompetence. When a panicky Fourth
Republic government gave independence to Morocco and Tunisia, which
was more than the Muslim Nationalists were asking at the time, the army
felt a deepened sense of betrayal.

Suez confirmed the diagnosis. Though the highly trained paratroop-
ers of General Massu dropped at Port Said with splendid precision, the
government yet again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The
French deputies — “the monkeys in the Palais Bourbon” who comprised
the “system” — could no longer be left in charge. Particularly among the
more idealistic officers the feeling grew that France needed a reform not
merely of her politics but of her national life. Though French tradition
taught that the army was “La Grande Muette” (the Great Mute), history
had provided plenty of exceptions. Indeed, French history inspired some
of my friends in Paris to repeat the adage: “Never trust a man who must
put on a disguise in order to establish his authority — be he a priest, a
judge, or an army officer.”

I hated to acknowledge that Algeria’s problems had become too div-
isive to be resolved by a badly divided French government. In spite of
its persistent untidiness, I had always been fond of the Fourth Republic;
its very weakness had been its most appealing virtue, for it was incapable

The French Crisis and Stevenson Again (1958-1961) 757

of resisting accommodation with the larger Europe I thought essential.
What would happen with a strong man now striding on stage? In July, a
month after de Gaulle’s investiture, I stood on the Champs Elysees as he
rode by, standing tall and imperious in an open Citroen, waving his hand
with that limp gesture that always seemed out of character. The silent
attention of curiously impassive crowds was disturbed by only scattered
wrathful chanting of “Algerie Frangaise.”

The General had proved an indispensable dens ex machina: only he
had the strength and audacity to resolve the agonizing Algerian crisis.
Yet my relief that; France had been saved from a right-wing military
coup was dampened by the fear of resurgent French nationalism. I
strongly favored a modern structure for Western Europe, and, though
the General had sp*oken of Europe in ambiguous terms, I saw little chance
of reconciling his commitment to ersatz grandeur with a unified Europe
that could play the role of equal partner with America.

For the time being, the European idea would no doubt coast along
on its own momentum, since de Gaulle would have to concentrate on
Algeria. But, once the Algerian crisis was settled — by, I felt certain, the
ultimate conferring of independence — he would be free to focus on
Europe and would almost certainly inject a corrosive element into the
European chemistry. I discussed this with Jean Monnet but found him
unprepared to speculate. Though he had grave reservations about the
General, based on long experience in dealing with him in Algeria and
later in Paris, he was unwilling to abandon hope that he and de Gaulle
might someday achieve a modus vivendi that would let Europe go for-
ward.

Adlai Resurgent ?

Meanwhile, though France was very much on my mind, I maintained
a latent interest in American politics. I saw Adlai intermittently, and we
invariably found ourselves speaking of his future. In July 1959, I spent
a week with him on th e Flying Clipper , a 205-foot sailing yacht owned by
a Swedish publisher and shipping magnate that had been chartered for
a Mediterranean cruise by one of Adlai’s old friends, William Benton.
Although there were other guests aboard (the yacht could sleep sixteen
and had a crew of thirty-five), Adlai and I managed to steal time together,
sitting on the forward deck in the sun. He was having a hard time focus-
ing on politics; it was a summer of pure leisure and he delighted in the
pleasures of the rich. Wherever he was, Adlai tended to hold court, sur-
rounded by idolatrous and indulgent friends who looked after his every
need. Although I hated to inject reality, if we were to avoid one more
orgy of indecision, it was time for him to make up his mind what he
wanted to do.

i $8 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

I left the yacht mid-cruise to return home, later meeting Adlai at
Eze-sur-Mer on the Riviera, where he was again staying with Bill Ben-
ton — this time in a villa with seven terraces to the sea. I reviewed a long
list of questions that I felt he should be prepared to answer on his return
to the United States. We talked at length about his chances for the nom-
ination, confirming my impression that he wanted very much to be
drafted. I followed this up on August 8 with a letter addressed to him at
Mary Lasker’s villa on the French Riviera, describing the general state
of the political weather as I saw it. Humphrey, I said, had not yet “gotten
his campaign off the ground”; Kennedy was “whirling like a dervish in
dead center”; nobody knew who Symington was; “Pat Brown conceded
that Stevenson could carry California; and a recent Gallup Poll had per-
suaded the politicians that a Stevenson- Kennedy ticket would be the
strongest one possible.” Thus, I concluded, “all this adds up to the fact
that events are beginning to respond to an inexorable political logic”;
yet, “if the convention insists on nominating you, I am sure it will be
because you do nothing about it.”

But Kennedy had quite different ideas. He hoped for Adlai’s sup-
port at the convention and, indeed, was eager that Adlai make the nom-
inating speech for him. On the day after the Oregon primary, which
Kennedy won against Humphrey, the future President had breakfast at
Stevenson’s home in Libertyville. Though several others were initially
present, the two men retired for a private meeting. Kennedy then made
a strong plea to Stevenson to make the nominating speech but met with
resistance. Later that day or the next, Stevenson telephoned me in a
fury. “Kennedy behaved just like his old man. He said to me, ‘Look, I
have the votes for the nomination and if you don’t give me your support,
I’ll have to shit all over you. I don’t want to do that but I can, and I will
if I have to.’ ” I had rarely heard Stevenson so angry. It was clear to me
that from then on there was no chance of Stevenson throwing his sup-
port to Kennedy, who obviously did not understand Stevenson’s aver-
sion to crude language. Stevenson said to me, “I should have told the
son-of-a-bitch off but, frankly, I was shocked and confused by that Irish
gutter talk. That’s pretty cheap stuff.” 1 Stevenson wrote to Arthur
Schlesinger commenting on the meeting and stating, “I can add that he
seemed very self-confident and assured and much tougher and bloodier
than I remembered him in the past.”

During the early part of the year, John Sharon, whom I had brought
into our law firm after the 1956 convention, and Tom Finney, an admin-
istrative assistant to Senator “Mike” Monroney, had begun a quiet drive
for Stevenson’s nomination. Working out of my law office and Senator
Monroney’s office on the Hill, they had made up detailed lists of dele-
gates and had begun canvassing them by telephone. They were thor-
ough and professional, and if they erred in judging the situation, it was

The French Crisis and Stevenson Again ( 1958—1961 ) 759

from wishful thinking. Though I wanted to believe all they were report-
ing, I found it hard.

Again, I shall avoid recounting the events of the convention in Los
Angeles. For me, as for other Stevensonians, it had high points — Eugene
McCarthy’s inspired nominating speech and the protracted demonstra-
tion when Stevenson came to the convention floor. Yet it put a definitive
end to our speculations; we now knew, every one of us, that Stevenson
would never be President, though he could still serve the country in a
lesser capacity. I think it likely that in many ways he would almost have
preferred to be Secretary of State — provided there was a President who
shared his general views. That would have freed him from attention to
grimy domestic affairs, enabling him to concentrate on foreign policy,
which was, and had always been, his consuming interest.

“The Stevenson Report”

Yet I was convinced that, since Stevenson had refused to nominate
Kennedy or to support him for the nomination, Kennedy would not
want him in that post. More likely, he would offer him the job of ambas-
sador to the United Nations. Thus, on July 26 , 1 wrote Adlai a long letter
prophesying that if Kennedy won, Stevenson would have to accept or
reject the United Nations job. Since, if he refused, it might be inter-
preted as sour grapes, I suggested that, if he did not want it, he should
clarify his position with Kennedy promptly. Though any firm commit-
ments prior to the election would be inappropriate, possibly even illegal,
Stevenson should let Kennedy know that he was interested “solely” in
the “post of major responsibility” — that is, Secretary of State. Because
the Republican ticket would probably consist of Nixon and Lodge, both
of whom could claim some foreign policy experience, Kennedy would
need to associate himself with Stevenson as a foreign policy expert dur-
ing the campaign; for that reason Stevenson’s bargaining position was
probably at its highest point.

You should, I wrote Stevenson, “not only indicate to Kennedy that
you are willing to campaign in certain selected areas, but also mention
the possibility of your setting up an ad hoc group to formulate a specific
foreign policy program for execution during the first months of next
year.’' With matters deteriorating during the latter days of Eisenhower,
the new administration, I wrote, would have to move fast and decisively
to “regain the diplomatic initiative and transform America’s reputation
around the world. I he new Kennedy Administration should behave as
the Roosevelt Administration had behaved during the crisis in 1933,
promptly putting forth this time not a domestic, but a well-prepared
foreign policy program, and Stevenson should have ready a blueprint
consisting of both specific actions to he undertaken in the first six months

160 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

and fresh formulations of long-term objectives and policy.

When Stevenson saw Kennedy at Hyannis Port, he broached the pro-
posal for the task force. Kennedy immediately approved but said noth-
ing about who would be Secretary of State. Stevenson telephoned me
the next day to report his meeting with Kennedy, saying, “Now that
you’ve got me into this task force business, it’s up to you to do the work.
I’m counting on you to come up with a full report. Let me know from
time to time how you’re proceeding and we can talk it over as the work
goes forward.”

I immediately set about mobilizing knowledgeable friends and dur-
ing the course of the summer produced a report that Theodore White
later called “Stevenson’s most important contribution to the Kennedy
campaign.” Knowing Adlai as I did, I had been sure from the beginning
that I would have to take the laboring oar of drafting the report — at least
until we had produced a next-to-hnal draft that he could polish. In the
course of preparing the draft, I met with Stevenson only once — amid
magnificent French impressionists in Mary Lasker’s beautiful house on
Sutton Place. A few days after that meeting of October 5, I sent Steven-
son a preliminary outline of the report describing the work I was doing
and the people I was involving. Stevenson replied, “I marvel at the rap-
idity with which you have seized hold of this assignment.” 2

Immediately after President Kennedy’s election, I looked for the best
ways and means to deliver the report to him at Palm Beach, where he
was temporarily resting. I knew Kennedy only slightly and, though we
were on a first-name basis, that reflected merely the camaraderie associ-
ated with political campaigning. Since anyone who appeared at Palm
Beach was immediately beleaguered by the press, and I did not want to
upstage Adlai by advertising my own role in the report, I found it awk-
ward to arrange the delivery. Thus, even though I had written most of
the report, I turned to John Sharon, a colleague in my law office who
had known Kennedy longer and better, and dispatched him to Palm
Beach with the document. It was the first time Sharon had ever seen it.

Following my original proposal to Stevenson I had, in part I of the
report, listed questions requiring immediate attention: the gold drain,
the postponement of discussions of the NATO deterrent, new initiatives
in disarmament, assurances on Berlin, and support of the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In part II, I pro-
posed long-term policies in the fields of economic development, NATO,
nuclear cooperation, and arms control. In order to bring about a greater
coherence in economic policy, I outlined a comprehensive foreign eco-
nomic legislation that would provide new aid proposals and give the
President authority over a five-year period to reduce tariffs by 50 per-
cent. I included in the appendices papers relating to China, Sub-Saharan
Africa, and the organization of the State Department, and I recom-

The French Crisis and Stevenson Again (1958—1961) 161

mended the formation of further task forces to deal with Latin America
and Africa.

When Sharon handed Kennedy the document, he called his atten-
tion specifically to the immediate recommendations. Kennedy showed
particular interest in the OECD and the problems with Cuba. “When he
finished Part I,” Arthur Schlesinger reports, “Kennedy closed the vol-
ume and said: ‘Very good. Terrific. This is excellent. Just what I
needed.’ ” 3 Though Sharon handled himself dexterously in fielding
Kennedy’s questions that were quite out of his Held, he did not disclose
that he had played no part in preparing the document. That led to con-
fusion. Kennedy assumed that the report was largely Sharon’s work and,
during the next few days, telephoned John to commission him to under-
take additional task forces on other subjects. It took some time to get our
responsibilities sorted out. Although there was mistrust of the exercise
on the part of Kennedy’s Senate staff, who were jealous of anyone
intruding from the Stevenson camp, Kennedy insisted on our going for-
ward independently. The assignments he gave me were, among others,
to organize and chair forces on the balance of payments, foreign eco-
nomic policy, and the OECD.

1 worked night and day on these task force efforts for the next six
weeks, so that they could be ready by the end of December. Meanwhile,
the President was going forward with his appointments. He had already
designated Dean Rusk as his Secretary of State and Chester Bowles as
Under Secretary of State, and there were rumors in the newspapers that
he had decided to appoint a liberal Republican businessman, William C.
Foster, as Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs. Foster, whom
I knew and liked, had been deputy to Paul Hoffman in administering
the Marshall Plan, but he was a Republican and by this time the cabinet
had more than the usual share of Republicans in key posts — including
C. Douglas Dillon in Treasury and Robert McNamara in Defense. About
that time, Chester Bowles asked me to become the Assistant Secretary
for Economic Affairs, but I declined. Later I was asked to become the
ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Devel-
opment, which I also refused.

I completed the task force reports just after Christmas Day, then
joined my family in Florida for the holidays. I was not happy. I felt well
equipped to be Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, but I had
few illusions regarding my chances. Nevertheless, to gain a clear idea as
to the views of the new President, I occupied myself in Florida by read-
ing — and outlining — Kennedy’s book The Strategy of Peace , a collection of
his speeches and writings.

I returned to Washington early in January, reconciled to remaining
in private life. Thus I was not surprised when, on a flight from New
York to Washington, I read in the New York Times a long story about the

1 62 Adlai Stevenson and Politics

imminent appointment of William C. Foster as Under Secretary of State
for Economic Affairs.

Without telling me, John Sharon at this point sprang to action. He
telephoned Stevenson, advising him of the rumored appointment and
urging him to try to persuade the new President to change his mind.
Instead of calling Kennedy directly, Stevenson telephoned Senator Wil-
liam Fulbright, who was then vacationing in Florida. The following day,
Fulbright drove to Palm Beach to tell President Kennedy that he was
giving Republicans too many top posts in the three principal depart-
ments — State, Defense, and Treasury — which would create the impres-
sion that the Democratic party lacked men of stature. The President,
Fulbright said, should appoint me rather than Foster, since I was emi-
nently qualified for the post. That admonition was reinforced a day or
two later when, at breakfast with the President, John Kenneth Galbraith
vigorously urged my appointment. As a result, the President changed
his mind about Foster and appointed me.

Although I had had considerable experience in the bureaucracy, I
had never held an assignment that attracted public attention, and 1 was
not fully prepared for such a drastic change in the pattern of my life.
For the next six years, I was to get very little sleep.

PART V

The Kennedy
Years

12 . Early Kennedy Years

On January 10, 1961, Dean Rusk telephoned to say that the
President had decided to appoint me Under Secretary of State for Eco-
nomic Affairs and that the announcement would be made the following
day. At the State Department, I found Rusk in a small office on the first
floor normally reserved for visitors, deeply engaged in a frantic but
largely futile exercise. He was trying to answer several pages of questions
sent to him by the President’s assistant and speech writer, Ted Sorensen.
It was an impossible assignment since the questions covered every for-
eign policy issue Sorensen could think of — ranging from the Far East to
Latin America and points north, east, south, and west. A staff might
have spent several weeks preparing the answers, but because the new
administration had not yet taken over and Rusk had not been con-
firmed, he had to develop the answers without any direct discussion with
the State Department. Rusk assigned me several questions, and I mobi-
lized some of my task force collaborators.

Within the next few days, I made the requisite calls on Speaker of
the House Sam Rayburn, as well as on my old friend Senator Fulbright,
chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. I appeared before the
Committee and on January 30 was confirmed.

The Kennedy Environment

The environment in which I found myself was both familiar and
strange. I felt well prepared to deal with those areas under my jurisdic-
tion — principally trade, foreign assistance and monetary policy — as a
result of my work in the Lend-Lease and Foreign Economic Administra-
tions during the war, my representation of foreign clients fighting trade

164 The Kennedy Years

restrictions, my participation in the Committee for a National Trade Pol-
icy, my work with Monnet, and my role as chairman of a number of
Kennedy task forces. I was already on familiar terms with a number of
the personalities — both American and foreign — with whom I would be
collaborating or negotiating as a result of my prior incarnations. With
the conditioned reflex of a blooded bureaucrat, I appraised my own
position in the scheme of things, trying to predict who would hold the
levers of power and to negotiate an effective division of labor. Though
I disliked bureaucratic infighting, I was not unmindful of what Robert
Ardrey, the ethologist, later called in a different context the “territorial
imperative.”

In the years that have since passed, the Kennedy Administration has
acquired a nimbus of romance, enhanced by the poignancy of the young
President’s murder and wistful speculation as to what he might have
accomplished. But even at the beginning of his term, there was more
than the usual hope and excitement. The President and his lady were
both young, handsome, and literate. They displayed those ineffable
qualities that an adulatory press referred to as “flair,” or “style.” Still,
though Ruth and I could not help feeling the savor of springtime in the
air, it was not the same uncritical excitement we had felt at the beginning
of the New Deal. Perhaps we had merely lost the extravagance of youth;
we were older and more cynically aware that “plus qa change, plus c’est
la meme chose.” Perhaps we had been in Washington too long, but it
seemed to us that there was an inescapable sense of deja vu. Whatever
the reason, I could not avoid feeling somewhat detached from the “new
team’s’’ exuberance and its confidence in the bright new plans and bril-
liant insights shortly to be disclosed. As usual, I was on the periphery: I
was a Stevenson protege; 1 had not been for Kennedy before San Fran-
cisco; I had not taught or studied on the Charles River.

Although 1 still thought of myself as a bright young man, I had to
recognize that I had now lived more than a half-century and, in serving
John F. Kennedy, was for the first time working for a man younger than
I was. Dean Rusk was my senior by ten months, but other luminous
members of the new foreign policy repertory company — McGeorge
Bundy (forty -one), Ted Sorensen (thirty-three), Bob McNamara (forty-
five), and even my old friend, Arthur Schlesinger (forty-four) — were of
a generation that had known the depression and early New Deal only in
childhood or from the history books they had read or — in the case of
Schlesinger — had written. I had unwittingly joined a new youth move-
ment.

The year was unmistakably 1961, not 1933 or 1942. The problems
confronting the country were different from those we had faced during
my earlier tours in government. In 1933, the country had been in the
depths of a searing depression. Urgent and visible action was required
not merely to ameliorate widespread hardship but to rescue the disas-

Early Kennedy Years i6y

trously shattered public morale. Events had provided a vivid backdrop
for the famous Hundred Days. Again, there had been a pervasive sense
of urgency when I had returned to Washington immediately after Pearl
Harbor. America’s energies were then even more narrowly focused; we
had a war to win, and, though there were a thousand ideas of how to
win it, our central purpose was never in doubt or dispute.

I found the mood and situation at the beginning of 1961 quite dif-
ferent. America had just enjoyed eight years of relaxed leadership under
Dwight Eisenhower. The Korean War had been over for six years; the
economy, while suffering a slight slowdown, was by no means in a crisis.
Even though Montgomery and Little Rock were place names with epic
connotations, those at the top reaches of the Administration showed only
a shadowy appreciation of the civil rights movement and the turbulence
it would create. The new President spoke of that “goddamn civil rights
mess,” considering it more an embarrassing problem than a serious cause
that had gained many proponents. Of course, we could dimly foresee
looming dangers and obstacles, but the world seemed just then to be
moving toward one of its rare periods of tranquillity. The Stalin legend
had been discredited at the Twentieth Party Congress; a leader whom
many regarded as a rough but rational peasant, Nikita Khrushchev, was
now in power, and there were intimations of a first thaw in the Cold
War.

JFK's Foreign Policy Views

T here was not a great deal to know about the new President’s views
on foreign policy. I hoped he was thoroughly purged of the obscurantist
attitudes of old Joseph P. Kennedy, his father. Prior to America’s entry
into the war, the senior Kennedy had been a rabid isolationist, who, as
ambassador to London, had inexcusably undercut President Roosevelt
in 1940 by testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
against the Lend-Lease legislation for which his President was valiantly
fighting. Nor had he ceased his isolationist frog-croaking even after John
Kennedy had entered Congress. Having opposed America’s interven-
tion to stop Hitler and the Nazis, he was also a capitulationist when the
Soviets threatened to sweep the earth. Believing that the United States
could survive as an enclave of freedom, he argued that we “should get
out of Korea and stop trying to hold the line at the Elbe or at the Rhine.”
If the Soviets decided to march, Joseph Kennedy argued, they could
easily reach the Atlantic, and it was not for us to try to stop them; indeed,
he thought it likely that Europe would, at least for a period of time, be
wholly taken over by the Communists. He was against our trying to stay
in Berlin, criticized the British loan, and opposed aid to Greece and Tur-
key, American participation in Korea, and the Marshall Plan.

I had long despised the elder Kennedy, who represented everything

1 66 The Kennedy Years

I disliked and mistrusted. He had been a buccaneer on Wall Street, an
opportunist in politics, and a debilitating influence when our civilization
was fighting for its life; now we were once more engaged against an
enemy with the same hard face of tyranny. Before I could wholeheart-
edly support the new President, I had to satisfy myself that he was free
of his father’s views and influence. Just after the election I had carefully
analyzed his writings and speeches — and had found reassurance that the
father’s noxious views had not infected the son.

Yet, to my mind, John Kennedy’s comments and actions during his
years in Congress still reflected a muddy concept of America’s role in
world politics. He had backed the Truman Doctrine and had supported
the Marshall Plan, but he had joined the cacophonous caterwauling of
the China lobby that Truman had “lost” China by trying to force Chiang
into a coalition with the Communists. Though partially redeeming him-
self by supporting the deployment of American divisions to Europe, he
had qualified that support by insisting on a totally unworkable ratio sys-
tem. Finally, and this was now of particular interest to me as Under
Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, John Kennedy, in February 1949,
had voted to recommit the Trade Agreements Extension Act.

Kennedy’s most spectacular adventure in foreign policy during his
Senate term had been his attack on French policy in Indochina in 1953.
No doubt encouraged by the attention these pronouncements had
achieved, he had again criticized French colonial policy four years later,
in July 1957, this time directing his guns at France’s activities in Algeria.
One victim of the verbal fallout was our then ambassador to Paris, C.
Douglas Dillon, who had expressed firm faith in the French govern-
ment’s handling of the entire matter. (Now Dillon was to be Kennedy’s
Secretary of the Treasury.) “French insistence upon pacification of the
area, in reality reconquest,” Kennedy declared in the Senate in July 1957*
is “a policy which only makes both settlement and a cease-fire less likely.” 1
Algeria, he concluded, was no longer merely a French problem; it was
time for the United States “to face the harsh realities of the situation and
fulfill its responsibilities as leader of the free world — in the UN, in NATO,
in the administration of our aid programs and in the exercise of our
diplomacy [to shape] a course toward political independence for
Algeria.” 2

Though I had long been trying to convince my French friends that
“Algerie Frangaise” was not a policy they could sustain, I was wary of the
young Senator’s proposal to inject America into a problem only France
could settle.

Dean Acheson publicly called Kennedy’s Algerian address an insen-
sitive speech that would do more harm than good in resolving the
Algerian problem, and I later recalled that speech when Kennedy and
successive American Presidents resentfully rejected suggestions that

Early Kennedy Years i 6 y

Vietnam was not exclusively an American affair or that we should fold
our tents and go home.

The next year, 1958, Kennedy warned the Senate of a forthcoming
Soviet missile gap that would become most dangerous during the early
1960s, when “the deterrent ratio might well shift to the Soviets so heav-
ily, during the years of the gap, as to open to them a new shortcut to
world domination.” 3 Couched in bureaucratic jargon, that statement was
not merely fuzzy in meaning, it was later shown to have been largely an
aberration. 1 hat it was to become one of the critical themes of Kennedy’s
campaign against Nixon was not surprising; campaigns are rarely fought
over relevant issues, and the controversy over the fictitious missile gap
was at least more important than the fatuous hassle over the defense of
Quemoy and Matsu — small islands most Americans could not find on
the map.

Few Presidents, if any, take office fully armed, like Minerva, with a
coherent view of American foreign policy. Wilson was a moderate
American reformer with a strong sense of his own superior morality; his
romantic foreign policy was shattered on the gneiss of Realpolitik. Frank-
lin Roosevelt was enamored of naval power and steeped in the doctrines
of Admiral Mahan, but he was also a pragmatist whose vague strategic
concepts crystallized during the course of his long and eventful tenure.
Eisenhower had an inchoate sense of where America should go but could
not articulate it; Nixon’s mistakes were concealed under a Bearnaise of
Kissingerian abstractions. Ford came to office modest about his mastery
of foreign policy and, as Churchill once said of Clement Attlee, “he had
much to be modest about.”

Prior to inauguration, most American Presidents have had little
exposure to foreign policy and approach the subject ill-informed, eager,
and pragmatic. Europeans carry more baggage of history and theory.
\ et, though Kennedy was certainly not steeped in strategic thought, he
came equipped with a bright and alert mind and gathered about him
exceptionally able people.

The Kennedy Style

Kennedy was the pragmatist par excellence; although he sometimes
alluded to conceptual ideas in his speeches, his main concern was action
and day-to-day results. When one tried to point out the long-range
implications of a current problem or how it meshed or collided with
othei major national interests, Kennedy would often say, politely but
impatiently, “Let’s not worry about five years from now, what do we do
tomorrow?” I was frequently disappointed by his reluctance to face the
longer-range implications of either acting or not acting. In my view, the
emphasis of Professor Richard Neustadt that a President should seek, so

1 68 The Kennedy Years

far as possible, to “preserve his options” provided too facile a rationali-
zation for postponing unpleasant decisions on major issues where results
would not be immediately apparent. Though I found Kennedy intellec-
tually alert and quick to understand a given problem, he was not, in my
opinion, profound in either his analyses or his judgment.

On only one occasion did I ever hear anyone try to force him to a
long-range decision he clearly wanted to postpone. He had asked Dean
Acheson to attend a meeting during which we discussed every facet of a
burdensome problem. At the end of the long evening, President Ken-
nedy announced that he would have the question studied further. Ache-
son flared up, “There’s no point in studying the matter further, Mr.
President; you know all you’ll ever know about it. The only thing to do
with the issue is to decide it.” Though obviously taken aback, the Presi-
dent responded politely, but Acheson did not immediately cool down
and the meeting ended uneasily.

Kennedy was without doubt an effective advocate, but if it is now
part of the mythology that he was a gifted speaker, that is only by con-
trast to those whom we have since endured. He spoke with a peculiar
Bostonian cadence, letting his voice fall just when it should have risen to
gain maximum effect. An attractive figure on the platform, easy in man-
ner, armed with eloquently phrased speeches interlarded with quota-
tions and poetry, he projected charm but little passion. Though audiences
liked him and found him disarming, they were rarely roused as Roose-
velt, for example, had roused them. He was young and boyishly good
looking; he and his stylish wife brought a glamour and gaiety to the
White House unknown perhaps since the days of Dolly Madison. Never-
theless, he could not impose his own personality on the events of the
day, as I had seen Roosevelt do three decades earlier.

Dean Rusk , My Self-Contained Leader

My immediate chief was Dean Rusk, for whom 1 developed both
respect and affection. Though he gave many the impression of coolness,
he quickly became a warm friend. I could talk freely to him on any sub-
ject. Thoughtful and reserved, he possessed a quiet humor, enormous
moral resources, and had a deep commitment to strongly held ideas and
principles. His ample reservoir of fortitude sustained him during critical
periods, and he displayed an almost excessive dedication to work. Indeed,
his unrelenting efforts over his eight-year tenure as Secretary of State
permanently impaired his health.

His desire, as he expressed it on many occasions, was to leave the
next Secretary of State with problems no worse than he had found them
when he took office. It was not a sentiment I shared; I would have chased
far more rabbits than he, but that reflects a difference in temperament

Early Kennedy Years 169

and philosophy. During my first months in the Department, when my
jurisdiction was limited to economic affairs, Rusk’s apparent indiffer-
ence to my activities bothered me; I was making important decisions and
felt the need for a continuing dialogue with the Secretary. I expressed
that concern to Lucius Battle, the wise and perceptive head of the
Department’s secretariat who had known Rusk well for many years, and
much to my surprise he burst out laughing. “Only the other day,” he
said, “Dean told me, ‘I wish I knew what Ball’s doing; he goes his own
way and never talks to me.’ ” That colloquy cleared the air; thereafter,
the Secretary and I established regular and thoroughly satisfactory com-
munications.

Rusk shared my general views about European unity, although he
did not feel as strongly about it as I and was skeptical of the reactions of
European governments that all too often tended to regard the world’s
major conflicts as a spectator sport. For example, when the Dutch gov-
ernment pressed us hard to defend their interests in New Guinea (West
Irian), then under threat from President Sukarno of Indonesia, Rusk’s
response was unequivocal and, I thought, unanswerable: “If the burgh-
ers of Amsterdam are not prepared to send their sons to save the area,”
he said, “why should we ask American boys to fight and die for it?”

Rusk’s discipline and patience admirably equipped him to deal with
the Soviet Union. When, during the summer of 1961, he conducted a
marathon negotiation with Gromyko over Berlin and Germany, he was
as competent as his adversary at reiterating the same positions again and
again, varying the exact formulation just enough to keep the dialogue
going without giving away a single nuance.

Unlike several of my more flamboyant colleagues, Dean never let
personal vanity color his views. His loyalty to his country, and indeed to
the President, contributed to a reserve that limited and often distorted
the impression he made on those about him. With his quiet humor, he
could easily have adopted a public personality that would have provided
the press with far better and more sympathetic copy. It would have
increased his popularity and even in some instances his effectiveness.
But instead, he kept the press at arm’s length, rarely telling them any-
thing they did not know already or could not easily obtain from others.

Consistent with his view of the relations between a Secretary of State
and his President, he expressed his opposition to the projected Bay of
Pigs expedition only privately to Kennedy. When that expedition proved
a fiasco, he never disclosed that he had cautioned against it. Later, de
Gaulle expressed his admiration for Rusk as a man who would never
embarrass his chief; Rusk would never put the President in the position
of publicly rejecting his advice if the President decided to go forward
with a project Rusk opposed. He followed the tradition of Secretary of
State George Marshall whom he greatly admired.

ijo The Kennedy Years

Chester Bowles, the Idealist

In contrast to Dean Rusk, Chester Bowles, the Under Secretary of
State during the initial months, was far too open and voluble. When the
Bay of Pigs failed, he made the mistake of letting it be known in public
that he had advised against the venture. I had become acquainted with
Bowles during the 1956 Stevenson campaign. I found him sympathetic
with what I was trying to achieve, but his interest in economic policy was
largely concentrated on assisting the Third World — particularly the
nations of Asia and, to a lesser extent, Africa. Bowles was a warm and
generous spirit who inspired affection. Too noble for life in the bureau-
cratic jungle, he still held courageously to his principles. Given their dis-
parity in temperament. Dean Rusk and he could not possibly work
together effectively. Rusk was impatient of windy abstractions, while
Bowles, who had begun his career in the advertising business, was ena-
mored of sweeping statements and broad concepts that often seemed
little more than catch phrases.

Bowles favored those romantic cliches to which Adlai Stevenson was
also addicted, but he lacked Stevenson’s grace of expression, underlying
earthiness, and cynicism. He genuinely believed that the basic world con-
flict was “a struggle for men’s minds,” that the world’s central drama was
“the revolution of rising expectations,” that “Point Four may go down in
history as the most important idea of our generation,” 4 and that the
Soviets now realized that military aggression and the threat of aggres-
sion had become a “dead end.” It was not that he frivolously discounted
the Soviet military threat, but he disliked coming to grips with Soviet
bloody-mindedness on a day-to-day basis, preferring to concentrate on
schemes to elevate what we then called the underdeveloped countries. 5
He saw enormous possibilities in grandly conceived public work projects
that would benefit large areas of Southeast Asia; indeed, he talked about
one project so often that iconoclasts of the press began referring to his
weekly background briefings as “Up and Down the Mekong River with
Gun and Camera.”

I was fond of Chester Bowles. Who would not be? Yet, though we
maintained the warmest relations, we had few useful exchanges of views.
We were always promising one another to have a long talk in which we
could deeply review current policies, but when we did meet our conver-
sation produced little. As I saw it, Chester Bowles’s views were — super-
ficially, at least — much closer to Stevenson’s than to mine. I did not
question the need to provide foreign assistance to the poor countries of
the Southern Hemisphere, but 1 saw little chance for rapid improvement
in the standard of living in countries where the demographic curve kept
rising precipitately.

Even though his tenure in the Department was brief, Chester Bowles

Early Kennedy Years lyi

achieved many useful things. He helped ambassadors carry out a con-
sistent policy by arranging for a circular letter from President Kennedy
that authorized them to “oversee and coordinate all the activities of the
United States government” in the countries to which they are accredited —
with the exception, of course, of military forces in the held under United
States or area military command. Securing that letter was no mean
achievement; it was opposed by the Defense Department, the CIA, the
Departments of Agriculture and Interior, the Peace Corps, and even by
some older foreign service officers who wished to confine the responsi-
bilities of the foreign service to traditional diplomatic relations.

Most of all, Bowles enriched the foreign policy establishment by
recruiting extremely able men, such as Edwin Reischauer, who became
a brilliant ambassador to Tokyo, Edward R. Murrow, who headed the
United States Information Agency (which included the Voice of Amer-
ica), 1 homas Hughes, the astute and informed head of the Depart-
ment’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and Abram Chayes, the
Department’s legal adviser. But Bowles was far too gentle and imprecise
to be effective in the day-to-day work of the Kennedy Administration.
He tried to see every question in the long view, whereas the Kennedy
modus operandi required quick answers and prompt action.

Broadened Responsibilities

From January to November, 1961, my limited role as Under Secre-
tary of State for Economic Affairs excluded me from the initial discus-
sions regarding our broad military and political strategies. But it did save
me from involvement in — or even any advance knowledge of— the Bay
of Pigs adventure in April of that year. I like to think I would have
opposed that project, as I later opposed the Vietnam War, but I cannot
be sure; I was then new at the job; I did not know either the President
or the Secretary of State very well, and I do not know how loudly I would
have expressed opposition.

One day during the latter part of the summer of 1961, Rusk drew
me aside to say, “I want you to take over more and more political matters
and get yourself injected into them. Chet isn’t up to it.” From August 4
to August 10, both the Secretary and Bowles were out of the country,
and I had my first experience as Acting Secretary.

As the months wore on, I became more and more involved in non-
economic matters. During October and November, Dean Rusk showed
me the daily reports of his discussions with Gromyko on Berlin, and I
was given a full account of President Kennedy’s meeting with Khru-
shchev in Vienna. As Rusk and I became better acquainted, a new work-
ing pattern evolved. In early September, he assigned Bowles responsibility
for administration and personnel, policy planning, and long-term oper-

ij2 The Kennedy Years

ations; I was to spend more time backstopping him in crisis situations.
On November 25, 1 was in Geneva at a ministerial meeting of GATT
(the organization supporting the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade that administered a set of rules and provided a forum to facilitate
the liberalization of commercial policy). Late in the evening, Rusk tele-
phoned to tell me that I was being appointed the Under Secretary of
State and that Bowles would take an assignment in the White House. He
also said that the President was appointing Averell Harriman Assistant
Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs. Harriman, who was then
involved in negotiating the Laotian settlement and staying in the same
hotel, called me a few minutes later to ask for details. The Secretary had,
he said, asked him to take a new job and he had accepted. He had not
heard clearly whether he was to be Assistant Secretary for European
affairs or for Far Eastern affairs, but, with characteristic good spirit, had
accepted anyway.

McGeorge Bundy

Almost more important than my relations within the State Depart-
ment itself were my continued dealings with the White House, and par-
ticularly with the national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy. Bundy,
who had been Dean of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, had, as a Republi-
can, worked in Thomas Dewey’s Presidential campaign in 1948 and then
backed Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. But, after the Republicans had
nominated Nixon in i960, he crossed the aisle to organize a scientific
and professional committee to support Kennedy.

Though 1 did not know it at the time, Kennedy had originally wanted
Bundy as Secretary of State but felt that a forty-six-year-old President
could not have a Secretary two years younger. When Kennedy had then
suggested that Bundy be made Under Secretary of State, Rusk had
demurred. (Had Bundy taken that job, my own role in the government
would have been quite different.) Kennedy had then appointed him
Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and
encouraged him to build what amounted to a foreign office in micro-
cosm, which, he hoped, might move more quickly and incisively than the
State Department, for the President thought the Department muscle-
bound by habit and tradition. Not only was the Department regarded as
overstaffed and bureaucratic, but the persecution of the McCarthy period
had conditioned career foreign service officers to hedge their bets and
make compromise recommendations rather than urge clear-cut deci-
sions.

Because of Bundy’s estimable qualities — his devotion to ideas, his
loyalty to the President, his sense of fair play, and his recognition of the
primacy of the Secretary of State as the President’s foreign policy
adviser — he played a strong hand in formulating our foreign policy with

Early Kennedy Years 773

only a minimum of friction with the State Department. Every President
should be entitled to organize the top reaches of his government to
accommodate his own habits and predilections, and with Bundy in the
White House, the machinery worked smoothly. Yet subsequent events
have shown the dangers of such an arrangement when the man holding
that position is self-centered and conspiratorial. During the years from
1969 to 1973, Henry Kissinger used the office to undermine the Secre-
tary of State, William Rogers, and in the Carter Administration, Zbig-
niew Brzezinski drove Cyrus Vance to resignation. Setting themselves
up as spokesmen for American foreign policy in competition with the
Secretary, each in turn preempted major areas of policy and connived
to exclude the State Department from effective participation.

During the shakedown months of the new administration, Bundy’s
operations and mine were not without friction, but we soon developed
an effective pattern of collaboration. For a time, I was confused about
Mac Bundy’s role — and by his extraordinary facility to grasp an idea,
summarize or analyze it, and produce an orderly response as fast as a
computer. Lacking the gift for such quick assimilation and fluency, I
initially felt at a disadvantage when the President would address a ques-
tion to me and Bundy would respond with a well ordered answer before
I could even begin to talk; on one occasion, I recall, I demanded equal
time. But the problem solved itself as we came to know one another
better; he was extremely helpful to me, and the fact that we both regarded
the world as confusing but comic overcame a slightly prickly beginning.

Unlike his successors, Bundy was too sure of himself to crave popu-
lar acclaim. Thus, he left the public interpretation of policy to the Sec-
retary, made almost no speeches during his tenure in the White House,
avoided appearing on television, and never aspired to be an ambassador-
at-large, traveling around the world lecturing the natives, befuddling
our ambassadors, and complicating already complex problems. If a for-
eign ambassador was to be called in, it was the Secretary who did it — or
Bundy with the Secretary’s knowledge and approval. I was to think of
this nostalgically during Kissinger’s and later Brzezinski’s tenure, when
the national security adviser even had his own press officer.

Robert McNamara

The personalities who played key roles in my own spheres of interest
varied depending on the nature of the particular problem. I would sort
out economic or financial problems with the Secretary of the Treasury,
Douglas Dillon — though the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary
of Labor were also sometimes involved. But, in any group where Robert
McNamara was present, he soon emerged as a dominant voice. I was
impressed by his extraordinary self-confidence — based not on bluster
but on a detailed knowledge of objective facts. He gave the impression

1J4 The Kennedy Years

of knowing every detail of the Defense Department’s vast operations and
had concise and impressive views on any subject that arose, reinforcing
his opinions with huge verbal footnotes of statistics. Since I am quite
incapable of thinking in quantitative terms, I found McNamara’s perfor-
mances formidable and scintillating. 6 He quoted precise figures, not mere
orders of magnitude. During the Vietnam War, if asked to appraise the
chances of success for different operational projects, he would answer
with apparent precision: one operation would have a 65 percent chance,
another a 30 percent chance. Once I tried to tease him, suggesting that
perhaps the chances were 64 percent and 29 percent, but the joke was
not well taken.

It would be quite unfair to imply, as some have done, that McNa-
mara was so accustomed to thinking in terms of numbers that he was
unaware of broader considerations. His mastery of that capricious
behemoth, the defense establishment, was not achieved merely by a vir-
tuosity with statistics; it required force of character. McNamara, more-
over, is a man of humanity and imagination, capable of strong
commitments to causes, no matter how unpopular, and relentlessly
determined to apply enlightened concepts against obscurantist opposi-
tion.

Rusk, Bowles, Bundy, McNamara, these were the colleagues who
played the most important part in my activities. They were an extraor-
dinarily gifted group; had the phrase not acquired a special connotation,
I might say “the best and the brightest.” Though I found myself later in
fundamental disagreement with every one of them over Vietnam, per-
sonalities did not intrude in the argument, and we retained our respect
for one another. In comparison with other administrations, there was
almost no feuding and fighting: we knew why we were there, we were
all busy, and we had no time to waste in petty maneuvers.

13 . The Context of the Time and
the Kennedy Program

The requirements of foreign policy, as I envisaged them in
1961, were steadily changing, yet, consistent with Alphonse Karr’s
aphorism, they still remained essentially the same. World peace still
depended primarily on a precarious power balance, and while trendy
thinkers decreed that the balance was no longer bipolar but multipolar,
the competition of the Soviet Union and the United States still domi-
nated world politics. Meanwhile, what for centuries had been the major
Western powers were completing their withdrawal from world political

The Context of the Time and the Kennedy Program ijj

and military involvement largely as a result of two parallel develop-
ments.

Dissolution of Colonial Systems

I he first was the dissolution of the great colonial systems that had
concentrated control of a large part of the globe in a handful of metro-
poles. Prior to the Second World War, no more than eight major capitals
ruled not only Europe but over a billion men, women, and children on
five continents. Deals and maneuvers among the members of this tight
little club settled the fate of peoples in areas little touched by the Indus-
trial Revolution. Although by the beginning of the Kennedy Administra-
tion, the great empires were far down the road to dissolution, huge
populations were still making the perilous passage from colonial depen-
dency to some form of juridical independence. As new and inexperi-
enced players scrambled for seats at the diplomatic board, the old rules
of play badly needed rewriting.

I recall a quip about the Australian political leader, Robert Menzies,
who became Prime Minister when the British Commonwealth was still a
small group of white nations and only just beginning to include new
nations of every color. “Bob,” someone remarked, “was always keen on
the Commonwealth until he found he had not joined Boodles but the
Royal Automobile Club.”

Already it was clear that much of our foreign policy, and indeed
much of my own time, would be focused on problems involving the bits
and pieces of disintegrating empires. So long as the metropolitan powers
retained control, the ethnic, religious, and tribal quarrels that threat-
ened civil war and insurrection could be effectively contained — albeit
sometimes with bloodshed — but with the British empire in liquidation,
bloody communal riots killed hundreds of thousands in India and Paki-
stan, while the Greek and Turkish communities slaughtered one another
in Cyprus. With France withdrawing from Indochina, the Vietnamese
began a civil war, while Belgium’s headlong flight from the Congo
unleashed tribal fighting that threatened a great power clash in the heart
of Africa.

1 he once great powers could no longer continue the ancient game
of bluff and finesse; there were now too many wild cards in the deck,
while the board was far larger. Though the United Nations had been
established to make new rules, it could not effectively keep peace between
the superpowers; its principal role was to serve as midwife for the birth
of new nations and to provide a forum where leaders of those nations
could make their voices heard, if not heeded. In the schoolroom of the
United Nations young leaders, thrown up by revolutionary convulsions,
hung together like new boys, forming little cliques — or, as they were
called, regional blocs. Since their governments were far too weak to tip

iy 6 The Kennedy Years

the balance in the continuous Indian wrestling between Washington and
Moscow, they chose to separate themselves from that contest by
announcing their neutrality, which they referred to as nonalignment. As
early as 1955, a number of Third World leaders met at Bandung under
the leadership of Nehru, Sukarno, and Tito in an effort to convert non-
alignment into a political force.

The Climactic Effect of the Suez Crisis

If the disintegration of empire created new states to complicate the
peace, it also removed the old metropoles from world power roles. That
second change, long in process, was abruptly confirmed by the Suez cri-
sis in 1956. T hat crisis resulted when the neurotic reaction of British
Prime Minister Eden and the French Prime Minister Guy Mollet to Nas-
ser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal led them to conspire with Israel
behind President Eisenhower’s back. Their misconceived and badly bun-
gled military actions against Egypt forced Eisenhower to oppose Amer-
ica’s traditional allies in the UN Security Council with cataclysmic results.
By exposing the relative im puissance of two nations with rich histories,
it expanded America’s own burdens. Neither France nor Britain would
any longer share responsibilities outside Europe, contracting their field
of vision to the narrower sphere of regional powers.

A few weeks after the Suez debacle, 1 had called on Mollet. An emo-
tional man, upset and embittered by the Suez fiasco, he felt a sudden
compulsion to unburden himself to an American friend, so for more
than an hour he poured out his version of the Suez story. The point he
primarily emphasized was that the Americans incorrectly claimed to
have been taken by surprise; Eden had warned Under Secretary of State
Robert Murphy that the French and British might feel compelled to act.
Even so, he insisted, the French would have gone ahead even against
American disapproval had not Eden succumbed to a protracted sobbing
spell when faced with displeasure. Later I asked Bob Murphy about the
story and he gave me a detailed account of American efforts to prevent
the rash and foolish action.

The Suez debacle not only ended British and French pretensions to
great-power status, it drove Nasser toward the Soviet Union and titil-
lated Israel’s expansionist ambitions. But Eisenhower and Dulles were
evenhanded. If our European allies had to withdraw, so had the Israelis.
By threatening to cut off America’s public and private subsidies to Israel,
they forced Ben Gurion — kicking and screaming — to pull the Israeli army
back from the Sinai. It was the last time America applied the same rules
to Israel that it applied to other allies or other friendly countries. There-
after, when Israel embarked on adventures in total disregard of Ameri-

7 he Context of the Time and the Kennedy Program iyy

can views or interests, it risked little more than a gentle pro forma rebuke
from Washington.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Dulles continued to wage the Cold War
as a religious conflict, ranting against “godless Communism.” A literal-
minded lawyer, he approached the problem of Soviet expansionism as
though he were resisting a corporate takeover. Treating the complex
relations between nations as business arrangements between corpora-
tions operating under national laws, he negotiated security treaties that
committed us to defend forty-two nations. Lacking a sense of the absurd,
Dulles had no sense of perspective. As my friend Walter Lippmann wrote,
he was “not a prudent and calculated diplomat, but a gambler . . . with
promissory notes engaging the blood, the treasure and the honor of the
country.” Nor was there a consistent strategy; while Dulles expanded
America’s commitments, Eisenhower reduced our military budget in the
name of fiscal responsibility. Entrapped by that contradiction, Dulles fell
back on his fanciful doctrine of massive retaliation (or, as it was topically
called, “more bang for a buck”), which, he inanely claimed, somehow
gave the United States the “initiative” — whatever that might mean.

The new Kennedy Administration thus came to power in a time of
confusion. America had survived the shock of the Sputnik in 1957,
though not without angry accusations that America had lost the techno-
logical lead and might no longer possess “an adequate margin of deter-
rence” over the USSR— all of which foreshadowed a similar brouhaha
in the latter 1970s. For a brief moment, some Americans regarded the
Russians as ten feet tall and even took seriously Khrushchev’s boast that
the USSR, with its fast economic growth, would “bury” us — until saner
heads provided a more realistic perspective.

In the months that followed, there was much talk of the relaxation
of East-West tensions, but there were also a number of disquieting inci-
dents. Vice-President Nixon encountered angry demonstrations on a trip
to South America; Castro took over in Cuba, slowly strengthening his
dependence on Moscow and thus confronting America with a patent
violation of a revered item of our national credo: the Monroe Doctrine.

1 hat doctrine forbade European powers from intrusion into the West-
ern Hemisphere, which we regarded — though we avoided stating it in
those terms — as our exclusive sphere of interest and influence.

Khrushchev brought the United Nations briefly into the limelight by
waving his shoe and pounding it on the desk, while the breakdown of
the Summit Conference in Paris in May i960 over the U-2 incident,
when Francis Gary Powers was shot down, set the West’s teeth on edge.
Meanwhile, a small-scale war in Laos was occasionally noted in the back
pages of the newspapers.

It was clear long prior to President Kennedy’s inauguration that
Khrushchev was far different from Stalin and that Soviet methods and

ij8 The Kennedy Years

manners had undergone substantial change. The Soviet regime, as I then
saw it, was no longer primarily driven by an evangelical compulsion to
extend the reach of Communism — if it had ever been; its major engine
of expansion was merely old-fashioned, imperialist compulsion. So long
as we maintained our moral and military defenses, Moscow was unlikely
to risk a frontal challenge; yet I had no doubt that the Soviets would lurk
patiently in the bushes to pounce on any emerging target of opportunity
they could exploit at acceptable costs and risks. “The long twilight strug-
gle” of which the new President spoke in his inaugural address required
that the United States at all times have enough force available to assure
that, if the Soviet Union challenged significant strategic interests of ours
and our allies, the risks and costs would be unacceptable.

That meant we had to be prepared to fight limited wars — or at least
assist Third World nations to fight them — a view that directly collided
with Dulles’s fraudulent theory of “massive retaliation.” To the extent
that that theory was ever rationally articulated (Dulles wrapped it in
opaque rhetoric), it meant that whenever America faced even a marginal
challenge in any part of the world, we would threaten to use oui nucleai
arsenal. As Vice-President Nixon put it, “rather than let the Communists
nibble us to death all over the world in little wars, we will rely in the
future on massive mobile retaliatory power.” 1

What dangerous nonsense! I had long followed the scholastic spec-
ulations of the nuclear theologians. At Denis Healey’s instigation, I had
attended a famous conference at Brighton that led to the creation, in
1958, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. It
was there I first met a young, articulate practitioner of the new meta-
physics named Henry Kissinger. But I could never bring myself to believe
that, so long as we maintained a reasonable nuclear striking force of our
own, nuclear war between the superpowers was more than an intellec-
tual abstraction. Barring the domination of a lunatic such as Hitler the
prototypical “irresponsible” leader — no great nation was going to com-
mit suicide. Even Hitler had been unwilling to use poison gas.

The real concern was that the Soviets would test us in areas where
our interests were too marginal to justify a suicidal response. We desper-
ately needed to build up our conventional forces— particularly our
capability for quick flexible response— which the Eisenhower Adminis-
tration had permitted to fall into disarray. Though the antipathies
between the new, poor, weak nations largely in the Southern Hemi-
sphere and the old, powerful nations of the North would inevitably
increase, I did not foresee an ultimate class struggle on a global scale,
which was then a trendy prophecy. The vast populations of the poor
nations of the Southern Hemisphere did not possess modern military
power nor were they likely to obtain it for many decades.

To be sure, the Soviet Union had announced that it would encourage

The Context of the Tune and the Kennedy Program 779

“wars of national liberation” to establish its increasing hegemony over
Third World areas. But such wars, by their nature, would tend to remain
limited — threatening to evolve into Armageddon struggles only if the
territory in question were of major strategic significance, whether because
of geography or the possession of a vital resource (and oil was probably
the only commodity worth a big war).

Fear of China

Nor did 1 share the view then popular in some quarters that China —
more than the Soviet Union — was the nation we should fear in the future.
In spite of its overswollen population, China seemed unlikely to become
a major danger to the West. By 1961 it was only just beginning to expe-
rience the Industrial Revolution. Its economy was decades behind that of
either the Soviet Union or the Western democracies, and, as I saw it, its
huge population was more a source of weakness than of power. There
were simply too many mouths to feed, too many illiterate peasants to
train, and too thin a layer of education and sophistication for China to
be able to mobilize its teeming hordes with any effectiveness. Yet during
the middle sixties, while we were preoccupied with the Vietnam War,
the fear of a militarily powerful China on the march was to become an
obsession within some Administration circles. In 1965, after the famous
Lin Piao speech about “Peoples’ Wars of National Liberation,” Secretary
McNamara in particular became concerned with that possibility.

Kennedy Initiatives

All this was background for the shakedown cruise of the new admin-
istration. Though each new administration regularly strives to put its
own imprimatur on events and to claim patent rights to a fundamentally
different foreign policy, the broad lines of our international strategy had
changed only marginally since World War II. Time had shown that most
noisily announced innovations might be novel in style or method but
rarely in substance, and, though pipe-smoking experts in ivy-covered
halls periodically proclaimed the end of old eras and the beginning of
new ones, that proved more an academic fad than anything consequen-
tial. We had, they wrote, reached an end to the age of alliances and had
shifted from a bipolar to a multipolar or polycentric world (depending
on whether the author preferred Greek-based on Latin-based neolog-
isms). We were, some proclaimed, entering the post-industrial or tech-
netronic age — whatever that might mean.

In claiming to offer a new foreign policy, the Kennedy Administra-
tion was thus following a normal practice. Its policies reflected no sem-
inal change, nor did they represent a coherent body of doctrine or even

180 The Kennedy Years

a well-articulated strategic plan; at the most, they consisted of aspira-
tions, slogans, and changes of emphasis — certainly an improvement over
the two-dimensional thinking of Dulles’s Manichaean crusade.

The first broad formulation was put forward in the elevated lan-
guage of the President’s inaugural address. It was eloquent and apho-
ristic, and, as Ruth and I stood in twenty-degree (Fahrenheit) weather on
the steps of the Capitol, we were warmed by the pervasive excitement
and expectations. Several of my friends had, I knew, contributed lan-
guage for the speech, and I had already heard some of the key phrases.
But, while admiring its elegant rhetoric, I could not help thinking: “What
enormous open-ended commitments the President is making!” Over the
years, Walter Lippmann had repeatedly complained to me that the Tru-
man Doctrine had promised far more than America could, or should
ever try to, undertake; now Kennedy’s inaugural address was, if any-
thing, going even farther. We would, the President said, “Pay any price,
bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any
foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” We were not prepared
“to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which
this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed
today at home and around the world.” What we would seek, so the new
President said, was “not a new balance of power, but a new world of
law,” thus giving the address a strong Wilsonian flavor. Finally, the music
swelled to a crescendo: “Now the trumpet summons us again — not as a
call to bear arms, though arms we need — nor as a call to battle, though
embattled we are — but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight strug-
gle, year in and year out, ‘rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation’ — a
struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease,
and war itself .” 2

Those were brave words, spoken in that special cadence with a dying
fall that was a trademark of all the Kennedys. But what did it all mean
in specific terms? Implicit in the President’s noble words was the repu-
diation of two practices of the past: we would no longer use our foreign
aid primarily as an anti-Communist weapon nor would we demand, as
Dulles had done, that the recipient countries must regard our aid as a
vaccination against “immoral” neutralism. To the “unhappy people in
the huts and villages of half the globe, struggling to break the bonds of
mass misery,” the young President pledged that we would “help them
help themselves” for whatever period was required, “not because the
Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because
it is right.” And, again of the new states, he said, “We shall not always
expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to
find them strongly supporting their own freedom . . .” These were two
excellent principles our new administration asserted and tried to fol-
low — though we often had to yield before the imperatives of Realpolitik.

The Context of the Time and the Kennedy Program 181

The New Political Approach to Third World Countries

In dealing with the new nations just broken away from their Western
metropoles, the Administration sought to change the traditional empha-
sis on political stability. Postwar diplomacy had largely rested on the
assumption that the United States in the latter twentieth century was a
status quo power, while the Soviet Union was essentially a revolutionary
power, and that the United States would benefit by encouraging stabil-
ity; the Soviet Union, by exploiting turbulence. In critical areas, America
was accustomed to favor regimes that offered at least transient stability,
even when their practices often offended our ideas of freedom and
human dignity. If stability could be assured for a reasonable period
through colonial structures, such as Portugal’s, there was no reason for
America to rock the boat.

The Kennedy doctrine frontally challenged this approach. America
should not think of itself as a status quo country; its own traditions were
revolutionary. Old structures were crumbling; American policy must
accommodate to the new spirit of change and even revolution. If Amer-
ica failed to encourage the young revolutionaries in the new countries,
they would inevitably turn toward the Soviet Union.

America should, therefore, stop trying to sustain traditional societies
and ally itself with the side of revolution. The Kennedy Administration
was the first testing ground for these new theories. It applied them in
devising the Alliance for Progress — an effort to help the Latin American
countries break out of the old feudal molds. I am afraid it left little per-
manent residue.

Though the new President did not make human rights an obsessive
doctrinal theme as would President Carter sixteen years later, he still
spoke bravely of protecting them. We would position ourselves on the
side of change, showing empathy with the young leaders in the new
countries even at the risk of transient instability; but, since the Soviets
regularly exploited instability, rhetoric did not answer the hard ques-
tions. How much instability could we accept without risking a shift in the
power balance?

For America to put itself on the side of change meant, with regard
to most countries, the encouragement of young revolutionaries. Because
many of those revolutionaries had been exposed to Western education
either at the London School of Economics, the Sorbonne, or some
American university, they were bent on pushing their countries into the
industrial age. But how to do it:' Much of their Western instruction had
stressed the evils of capitalistic societies; many of their most sympathetic
instructors and professors had shown Marxist or Fabian leanings. West-
ern capitalism, they had been taught, required an entrepreneurial class
that, in most new countries, existed only in corrupt or primitive form.

1 82 The Kennedy Years

Market economics assumed the availability of private capital, but, if cap-
ital existed at all in the new states, it was usually in the hands of a small
feudal oligarchy, interested only in perpetuating its own privileges and
quite indifferent to the state of the masses.

All true, of course, but their professorial mentors had not bothered
to point out that socialist governments were miserably inefficient. Those
Third World countries most successful in entering the industrial age —
such as Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Brazil — relied heavily on private
enterprise, while states making relatively little economic progress, such
as India or Indonesia, depended on public sector solutions. The choice
involved the central issue of power. Young leaders in a hurry normally
preferred to preempt the power of decision; they opted for centrally
planned and directed societies, where they could serve as philosopher-
kings resplendent with their medals of authority — Western graduate
degrees in economics or political science.

The State of the Union

In spite of the exhilarating tone of Kennedy’s inaugural speech, the
domestic sky was already speckled with small clouds. 1 he storms to come
would involve more than the play and counterplay of political, military,
and social forces; latent social and economic troubles would also test our
unity and national purpose. 3 During a period in which Soviet economic
growth had fallen well below prior predictions, the United States had
enjoyed eight years of prosperity at stable prices. But that concealed
disturbing trends. Our international balance of accounts was beginning
to show persistent deficits. By the beginning of the Kennedy Adminis-
tration, economic growth had ceased to increase at a rate sufficient to
match the increases in our labor force and in productivity. During the
eight Eisenhower years, from 1953 to i960, America needed to increase
its Gross National Product by 4.5 percent a year to create the necessary
new jobs required by a burgeoning population, but, instead, GNP growth
had averaged only 2.4 percent. By the time of Kennedy’s inauguration,
unemployment had risen to 6 percent, though it was not widely visible
since the bulk of the unemployed were black or unskilled workers in the
inner cities. It was both the best and worst of times.

14. Assisting and Resisting the Third World

During my first eight months in the State Department, while
I served as Under Secretary for Economic Affairs 1 was faced with actions
and decisions in all three principal areas of my responsibility: foreign

Assisting and Resisting the Third World 183

aid, trade, and finance. I had favored foreign aid from the beginning
and I thought the level of our effort inadequate. It was the theological
aspect of foreign aid that depressed me. In 1961, development econom-
ics was at the height of its vogue. Inventing an overblown nomenclature,
the professors swarming into Washington talked tendentiously of “self-
sustaining growth,” “social development,” the “search for nationhood,”
“self-help,” and “nation-building.” President Truman’s Point Four Pro-
gram had been concerned merely with technical assistance, but the
experts now clamored for us to increase the flow of capital to the poor
countries. Young men in the governments of those countries (mostly
former students of the American experts) would, with the guidance of
those experts, devise development plans for spending that capital.
Instructed by the American experts, they would build a whole multitude
of new Jerusalems. They would construct new political systems, modern-
ize their economic life, re-draw trade lines, re-train labor, develop pro-
grams of land reform, expand education, design public health services,
and, with American hardware and technical help, acquire an appro-
priate military capability.

The prospect of leading the Third World into the twentieth century
offered almost unlimited scope for experimentation not only to econo-
mists but also to sociologists, psychologists, city planners, agronomists,
political scientists, and experts in chicken diseases. It was the golden age
for development theorists. Some university faculties were almost de-
nuded as prof essors left their tranquil campuses to instruct the natives in
the dank far reaches of the world. A story current at the time told of the
professor who boasted that he occupied “The Pan American Chair of
Development Economics.” By that he meant a first-class seat on Pan
American Airways to any destination in the world.

But the most presumptuous undertaking of all was “nation-building,”
which suggested that American professors could make bricks without
the straw of experience and with indifferent and infinitely various kinds
of clay. Hubris was endemic in Washington.

The Agency for International Development (AID)

As I had recommended in my foreign aid task force report, Presi-
dent Kennedy directed that we reorganize and consolidate our foreign
aid programs. In his hrst foreign aid message, in late March, he called
for a unified administration that would absorb the Foreign Operations
Administration, the Development Loan Fund, Food for Peace, the Peace
Corps, and even certain functions of the Export-Import Bank. New task
forces were established within the Administration to develop the plans
for a new agency. At the same time, Robert Komer on the White House
staff was charged with making a parallel reappraisal of the military

184 The Kennedy Years

assistance effort.

According to the development economists, foreign aid should not be
directly used as an instrument of American foreign policy but have a life
and raison d'etre of its own. Thus, they insisted, the new Agency for
International Development (AID) should be quite independent of unen-
lightened bureaucrats of the State Department who were not zealous
converts to the new theology. In the little boxes that comprised the
organization charts, the agency would be shown as reporting directly to
the President; though the organic legislation included some propitiatory
words about receiving “foreign policy guidance” from the Secretary of
State, it could largely go its own way. That meant, in theory, that it would
be guided by the standards of development economics rather than any
specific political or economic interests of the United States. I doubted
such a principle of operation could long survive the captious scrutiny of
Congress and that surmise ultimately proved correct.

I was delighted when the President chose Fowler Hamilton to head
the new combined agency. He and I had worked together long and
closely; we had started our new law firm and seen it prosper, and the
thought of my old friend playing a key role in the Administration enor-
mously pleased me. But it proved by no means an easy assignment. The
disputes among the foreign aid theologians as to how to organize and
administer a foreign aid program seemed to him — as they did to me —
bureaucratic, academic, tedious, and frivolous. At the same time, some
of the businessmen brought into the Administration on the urging of
Vice-President Johnson did not easily adapt to the Kennedy Administra-
tion ethos. Fowler Hamilton had to spend much of his time on Capitol
Hill, where foreign aid programs had only a limited constituency. Dur-
ing the years since the initial suggestion by President Truman of his
Point Four Program, foreign aid had been in an almost constant state of
reorganization — to the point where the recruitment of competent per-
sonnel was difficult, and efficient administration impossible. Stories of
ineptitude and wasteful expenditure had become part of the folklore,
and Congressmen could recite them by rote.

The Harvard and MIT development economists then at the height
of their influence not only pressed for the United States to provide max-
imum development dollars to the Third World but insisted that we try
to squeeze further dollars from our Western allies — particularly, the
Germans. My notes of the period are full of telephone calls, particularly
from Walt Rostow, urging me to demand this or that additional amount
from the Federal Republic for the Indian or Indonesian Consortium or
some other pet aid project. On my first official trip to Europe in the
middle of March, the White House had charged me to press Ludwig
Erhard, then Minister of Economics of the Federal Republic govern-
ment, to increase the German aid effort. I thought it a mistake to treat
our Western allies as a bank to provide capital resources for our gran-

Assisting and Resisting the Third World 185

diose Third World programs. But President Kennedy was not impressed
by my cautionary advice.

The Volta Dam

The African Bureau of the State Department took readily to the
Administration’s new Third World policies, interpreting them to suit the
vagaries of African politics. Headed by Assistant Secretary G. Mennen
Williams, it enthusiastically supported the new young African leaders
whose “one-party” democracy seemed to me a contradiction in terms.
The Administration greatly expanded the number of American embas-
sies throughout Africa, encouraged in this course by the new self-con-
sciousness of American blacks. Though few of them had ever been to
Africa or even thought much about it, sociologists and social workers
were busily urging black Americans to seek “identity” by attention to
their African roots. I thought it a questionable thesis. Black Americans
were, after all, Americans, and their problem was to cope effectively in
American society. The new emphasis on ethnic identification seemed to
me not only politically distracting but a cruel joke on the ethnic peoples.

The largest and most controversial project during the first year of
the Administration was the Volta Dam in Ghana. The commitment of
substantial sums (in the neighborhood of $133 million) was critically
complicated by the fact that Kwame Nkrumah — the first of the young,
black nationalist leaders to gain freedom for his African country — showed
increasing sympathy for the Soviet Union.

The Volta Dam would provide power not merely for Ghana but also
for Togo and Dahomey; in addition, it would supply energy for an alu-
minum reduction plant and smelter to be built by the Kaiser Aluminum
Company. What particularly recommended the project to the President
were the personalities involved. Its primary promoter was Sir Robert
Jackson, chairman of the Development Commission for Ghana, a man
of drive and imagination whom I had known casually when he had
worked with the United Nations in the 1950s. Jackson’s name and rep-
utation would, however, have meant little to the President had he not
been married to the persuasive Barbara Ward Jackson, who had exer-
cised such a strong influence on Stevenson. Lady Jackson lighted up
Kennedy’s imagination by recounting the benefits to African unity from
a project that cut across country lines. By financing the dam in a country
leaning toward Moscow, we would prove that America was prepared to
help Africans for their own sake and not merely to further our own
political interests. It might even keep Nkrumah neutral.

Intrigued by these arguments, Kennedy received Nkrumah at the
White House early in March 1961, when the African leader came to the
United Nations, although Eisenhower had earlier refused to extend such
an invitation. Nkrumah made such a good impression on Kennedy that

186 The Kennedy Years

the President wrote him in July that we were prepared to go ahead with
the Volta project. Then, when Nkrumah made a tour of Iron Curtain
capitals, Kennedy’s enthusiasm began to cool down. Should we commit
such a large share of the aid funds earmarked for Africa to a country
turning rapidly toward the other side?

I suggested to the President that we send a fair-minded American
industrialist to survey the project. Should we decide to go ahead, he
would be in better shape with Congress if the industrialist made a favor-
able report. I suggested Clarence Randall, the conservative head of the
Inland Steel Company, whom I knew and liked. Though Randall was,
within a few months, to be the steel industry spokesman when President
Kennedy sought to block a steel price increase and though he had, in
the 1950s, opposed me in a national radio debate on the Coal and Steel
Community (which he then called a “cartel”), he would, I felt confident,
provide an honest opinion. I thought he might also help persuade Nkru-
mah that he must stay nonaligned if he were to receive American bounty.

The British were pressing us to push forward with the dam. Sensitive
to Kennedy’s soft side, Prime Minister Macmillan wrote that our with-
drawal from the project could have the same tragic consequences as
Dulles’s decision to pull out of the Aswan Dam; it would enormously
strengthen the Soviet hand. The United States had been negotiating the
dam project with Ghana for three and a half years, and the Ghanaians
had already invested a considerable share of their meager resources.
Thus the affirmative argument took shape: Dulles had made a frightful
mess of Suez — one of the most tragic and far-reaching diplomatic blun-
ders of the century — and we should not repeat the same mistake simply
because the American right wing was breathing hotly on our necks. The
dam would take ten years to build, and, in the meantime, Nkrumah might
well disappear as Ghana’s leader — which in fact he did.

Clarence Randall left for Ghana on October 19 and returned on
October 3 1 . I took him to see the President on November 3. The burden
of his report was that we not make an immediate commitment but post-
pone the decision for a year. But that was not a practical solution, since,
as I explained to Randall, the Africans would see it as a flat rejection.
Sophisticated and reasonable, he readily accepted a vow of silence, rec-
ognizing that public knowledge of his report would tie the President’s
hands. I discussed the problem with the President at Hyannis Port on
November 24 and reviewed the situation at a National Security Council
meeting on November 28.

Meanwhile, Queen Elizabeth was scheduled to visit Ghana from
November 9 to November 20. If the United States torpedoed the Volta
project just before her arrival, it might incite dangerous demonstrations.
Thus I promised the British that we would not announce the decision
until the Queen’s visit was completed. Administration opinion was far
from unanimous, and, for the first time to my knowledge, Attorney Gen-

Assisting and Resisting the Third World i8y

eral Robert Kennedy differed from his brother. We should not, he
argued, make a large aid commitment to Nkrumah, who was more and
more moving toward the Soviet side.

After repeated discussions, the President finally said to me, “All right,
George, you make the decision.” I replied that he knew all the argu-
ments for and against the project. It seemed to me that we might secure
a long-term gain from going forward, but that did not mean we had to
go the whole way immediately. We could move forward on a limited,
conditional basis, while we kept a sharp eye on the evolution of Ghan-
aian politics. Our total disbursements during the hrst three years need
not amount to more than $28 million, and we could turn off the tap at
any time if Nkrumah behaved too badly.

Meanwhile, before a final decision was announced, we asked Clar-
ence Randall to return to Ghana and impress Nkrumah with the seri-
ousness of the conditions attached to our financial assistance. If Nkrumah
got out of line, our flow of funds would promptly dry up. Randall left
for Ghana on Friday, December 15. President Kennedy announced his
decision to go ahead with the dam on Saturday, December 16, after we
had touched the appropriate Congressional bases. Thereafter, Nkru-
mah developed a raging megalomania, calling himself Osagyefo, or
“redeemer,” and imposing a repressive dictatorship. He turned increas-
ingly against the West until, in 1963, the President instructed AID to
stop extending any further credit for the dam project. We had then
spent a total of $40 million on it.

Resisting the Third World

Dealing with foreign aid was, in many ways, far easier than maintain-
ing a rational trade policy. During the Marshall Plan days, the slogan
“trade not aid had a glib appeal, but vested interests still got in the way.
In our trade with the Third World, the slogan was even harder to apply;
our affirmations of solicitude gave an impression of cant and hypocrisy.

According to classical doctrine, each country should concentrate on
that type of production in which it has some comparative advantage.
Apart from proximity to raw materials, the comparative advantage of
most 1 hird World countries was limited to a large supply of low-cost
labor; logic called for those nations to assume the lion’s share of labor-
intensive production. But logic was no match for the realities of domestic
politics. Labor-intensive industries, by definition, employ large numbers
of voters and in democratic nations have exceptional political clout.
Whenever I hird World countries ship substantial amounts of labor-
intensive products to America, our domestic producers and their trade
unions complain that cheap foreign labor is taking jobs from our
workers.

For some Americans foreign aid has served as an excuse for denying

188 The Kennedy Years

Third World nations free access to our markets. It is politically easier to
obtain foreign-aid appropriations than to keep open our markets for
Third World products, even though that has meant depriving poor
countries of the chance to earn their living in the world economy.

Textiles — A Major Headache

Textiles (a prototypical labor-intensive product) posed a specially
critical problem for President Kennedy. He had been a Senator from
New England, where textile manufacturing flourished early, and, in
addition, had sought support in the southeastern states to which the tex-
tile industry had largely migrated. During his Presidential campaign, he
had committed himself to taking care of textile import problems, and
the industry promptly demanded that he redeem his promise. 1 he Pres-
ident turned the problem over to me. It caused me more personal anguish
than any other task I undertook during my total of twelve years in dif-
ferent branches of the government.

What, after all, was the American textile industry complaining about?
It was that entrepreneurs in Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and
other developing countries were using low-cost labor to manufacture
textiles for export to America. But why had our American industry failed
to establish sources of production in the low-cost labor areas of the Third
World? The Japanese textile industry had done so, as had other Ameri-
can labor-intensive industries, such as electronics. Had they been willing
to utilize the huge pools of Third World labor, the American textile
industry could have provided low-priced textiles to American consum-
ers. Rather than concentrating 1.3 percent of our labor force on the
production of textiles, our country might have shifted more rapidly to
the capital-intensive and knowledge-intensive industries and services that
befitted a nation with an advanced economy.

Textile company management personnel did not think in those terms.
Because textile production requires only limited capital and is, there-
fore, easy of entry, almost every American community acquired its own
textile mills at an early date. Certainly, that was the structure of the
industry until shortly before the Second World War. With family-owned
mills scattered over most of America’s fifty states, the industry was polit-
ically powerful — since company owners living in a Congressional District
have far more political influence with their Congressmen or Senators
than do large corporate absentee owners, no matter how economically
powerf ul. In addition, because of the vast number of employees and the
protectionist policies of the textile unions, the industry could apply almost
as much pressure as organized agriculture.

In spite of increased productivity resulting from concentration and
modernization during the period following the Second World War,

Assisting and Resisting the Third World 189

industry leaders still claimed that imports from Hong Kong, Japan, and
other Asian countries were driving them into bankruptcy, while labor
leaders chanted contrapuntally that imports were taking jobs from
American workers. I did not find the case persuasive, but the President
felt too deeply committed to stand against the mounting pressure. He
assigned the task of the following up on his commitment to his Deputy
Special Counsel, Myer Feldman, who had come to the White House from
Kennedy’s Senate staff. Feldman reflected the views of the industry’s
lobbyists and constantly pressed me to take steps against my liberal trade
convictions. No doubt he was merely doing what he was assigned to do,
but I wished he would not pursue the task so assiduously. Whenever I
told him about actions we were considering or sent him papers we had
drafted, the industry immediately knew about it.

To institutionalize the internal pressures, the President appointed a
Cabinet Committee on Textiles under the chairmanship of Secretary of
Commerce Luther Hodges, a former Governor of North Carolina — the
nation’s second largest textile-producing state — who had at one time been
general manager of all the Marshall Field textile mills. He responded by
conditioned reflex to the textile industry’s cries of distress. Nor were the
other members of the Textile Committee, Willard Wirtz, the Under Sec-
retary of Labor, and Henry Fowler, the Under Secretary of the Treas-
ury, always as firm as I would have liked in resisting the demands either
of the industry or its unions. Outside of colleagues in the State Depart-
ment, 1 received my strongest support from McGeorge Bundy’s staff,
particularly from Carl Kaysen. But jurisdiction over the problem
belonged to Feldman rather than Kaysen, and the Bundy staff could do
little to persuade the President to call off the pressure.

I was thus largely alone in trying to hold back the sentiment mount-
ing on the Hill, in the White House, and elsewhere in the Administration
to go along with the industry’s request for mandatory quotas on practi-
cally every textile and apparel item. I was determined at all costs to block
quotas. 1 hey would make a mockery of our concern for the Third World
and our commitment to liberal trade; moreover, they would put us
crosswise with the textile-importing countries of Europe, on which the
full weight of Asian exports would then be deflected.

In due course, the textile leaders fell back on the shopworn conten-
tion that their products were essential for national security — by which
they meant, I assumed, that naked American soldiers would be easier to
shoot than fully clothed enemies. I had heard it all before and was
understandably annoyed when, with no notice to me, the Director of
Defense Mobilization made a “finding” that the textile industry was
essential to national security. The problem was, of course, posed in
absurdly unreal terms. No one expected the industry to disappear; all
that had happened was that some textile imports had gained as much as

igo The Kennedy Years

10 percent of the American market. Though I did not regard that statis-
tic as shocking, I well remember a session with one of the industry lead-
ers, Mr. Robert T. B. Stevens, who almost tearfully insisted that the
industry would collapse unless we promptly closed our borders to “cheap
labor” products.

I had not joined the government to reinstate a regime of quantitative
restrictions that America had spent so much diplomatic effort to disman-
tle. But pressures continued to mount. Early in February 1961, soon
after the President’s inauguration, the Special Subcommittee to Study
the Textile Industry of the Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign
Commerce, under the chairmanship of Senator John O. Pastore of Con-
necticut, issued a report recommending mandatory sanctions. At the same
time, a formidable number of Senators and Congressmen joined in a
letter to the President attacking me and demanding action.

The Counter-Proposal — An International Agreement

To be sure, a few Congressional voices were raised on behalf of the
American consumer and against quotas. Senator Gore of Tennessee
pointed out that the American textile industry commanded more than
90 percent of the domestic market and also maintained a thriving export
trade. He knew of no other industry in such a favored position. But my
colleagues on the Textile Committee were not impressed, and they over-
ruled me by voting for mandatory quotas. Totally isolated, I could block
such a move only by a counter-proposal. With no idea how I would go
about it, I confidently asserted that I would negotiate an international
agreement that would limit textile imports, while permitting some grad-
ual increase at a systematic, hence nondisruptive, pace. To help me
develop a feasible approach, I co-opted Warren Christopher, an able
young Los Angeles lawyer, who was later to be Deputy Secretary of State
in the Carter Administration. I also borrowed a textile expert named
Stanley Nehmer from the World Bank.

Meanwhile, through Myer Feldman, the industry was frantically
demanding that I meet with their representatives and outline the
Administration’s intentions. That raised a major question of tactics since
the textile lobby defined the textile industry to include producers of every
product that could be directly or even remotely called a textile. But jute
bags, wool tops, burlap, carpets, and the like had little in common;
individual sectors of textile production faced disparate problems, and I
insisted on meeting with the various sectors individually — first with cot-
ton textile producers, another time with the silk textile industry, a third
time with wool, then jute, and so forth. Though that evoked an angry
response, I held fast and soon found myself enjoying the confrontation,
acrimonious and unpleasant as were my meetings with the industry. For
my private and secret gratification, I appeared before each textile group

Assisting and Resisting the Third World igi

dressed in a British-made suit, a British-made shirt, shoes made for me
in Hong Kong, and a French necktie. I made no promises other than
assuring the cotton textile producers that we would take their problem
up in an international meeting in July. As I was leaving one meeting, I
heard an industry representative say, “That’s the slyest bastard I’ve seen
in years. We certainly have to watch him.” I found such praise heart-
warming.

Meanwhile, the industry insisted that its minions participate in the
forthcoming negotiations. 1 refused. I was representing the totality of
United States interests, not a single industry, and there was no more
reason for industry representatives to participate than for representa-
tives of domestic consumer groups. Unfortunately, my position was
weakened when the French included a textile industrialist in their dele-
gation and the Germans proposed to bring over three textile people as
observers. At the end, we compromised by arranging for the American
cotton textile industry to send a delegation to Geneva. Its members would
not participate in the meetings or even attend as observers, but we would
keep them currently briefed and discuss developments with them.
Meanwhile, nearly half the members of Congress signed letters in favor
of mandatory quotas; if I failed at Geneva, they had the votes to pass the
necessary legislation.

I left for the Far East on June 30, to attend a meeting of the Devel-
opment Assistance Group which I shall shortly describe and to disclose
our textile predicament to the Japanese government and to the textile
industry in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, it was arranged that Warren
Christopher would go on to Geneva early in July to prepare the meeting.

Bitter Tea

From July 3 to July 6, I met with the British authorities in Hong
Kong. Since Chinese entrepreneurs owned most of the Hong Kong tex-
tile industry, I followed the suggestion of the United States Consul Gen-
eral and invited industry representatives to a tea party at the Peninsula
Hotel. Cushioning the blow as much as possible, I broke the sad news
that the United States government felt required to negotiate restraints
on their exports and that we would be discussing the matter in Geneva
beginning on July 17. I also visited Osaka to give the same word to the
textile industry there. When I returned to Tokyo the following day, I
saw a placard draped over a newsstand in front of my hotel hawking in
big, black letters a piece in the Far Eastern Economic Review , “Ball’s Bitter
Cup.”

Meanwhile, on July 7, Warren Christopher telephoned from Geneva
to say that the proposal I had forwarded to him from Okinawa for a
series of bilateral agreements seemed too complex and cumbersome to
achieve results by 1962. Christopher, himself , was working on a new ad

1 92 The Kennedy Years

hoc position. Since it was urgent that we have a plan well prepared before
the meeting, I agreed to fly directly to Geneva from Tokyo, arriving on
Friday, July 14. I still had not found a formula that met our political
requirements without mandatory quotas. I was deeply troubled.

Awake until early morning on the night of July 15, I hit on a prom-
ising approach. To avoid the rigid constrictions of fixed quotas, we might
give importing nations the right to call for restraint only when sudden
surges of imports threatened to disrupt the market for specific cate-
gories of items. I climbed out of bed, got myself a yellow pad, and by
sunrise, I had blocked out the outline of a scheme.

As perfected during the next few hours, my outline provided that if
a signatory importing nation found that a certain category of cotton tex-
tile import was “threatening to disrupt the market,” it could request
exporting nations to restrain their exports of that offending category to
a specified level, not lower than that prevailing for the twelve-month
period ending June 30, 1961. If, within thirty days, the exporting coun-
tries would not agree to such restraint, the importing country could take
steps to refuse imports above the level specified. To sweeten the medi-
cine for Third World countries, I included a statement of intention that
“this procedure will be used sparingly, with full regard for . . . the agreed
objective of obtaining and safeguarding maximum freedom of trade,
and only to avoid disruption of domestic industry resulting from an
abnormal increase in imports.”

Of course, the document was tailor-made for abuse. Once we gave
an importing nation the unappealable right to decide when its markets
were “threatened by disruption,” protectionist pressures would be hard
to resist. But it was the best I could do — or, more accurately, the least I
could get away with, since I had to get the American cotton textile
industry off the President’s back.

I could persuade the Third World exporting countries to join the
agreement only by putting emphasis on its stated purpose “to signifi-
cantly increase access to markets,” arguing that this would permit their
exports to grow, though precluding the disruptive growth of individual
items. I recognized, of course — and the more sophisticated representa-
tives of Third World countries also recognized — that the proposal was
smothered in a Bearnaise sauce of sham and sanctimony. Talk of
“increased orderly access” provided me a debater’s advantage, but I was
quite aware that the Third World textile-exporting countries would sign
only under duress, knowing that if they did not agree, the United States
would impose mandatory quotas. It was as simple as that.

I met individually with representatives of exporting countries for
intensive quiet talks in which I emphasized the growing pressure for
quotas in America and my desire to cushion the blow as much as possi-
ble. Meanwhile, I had to fight a rearguard action against the trade asso-
ciation and labor union representatives who had established themselves

Assisting and Resisting the Third World 793

in the same hotel and were blowing down our backs. I was annoyed by
their immoderate demands to the point where I could scarcely sit through
further long sessions with them without showing my irritation. Fortu-
nately, Willard Wirtz, then Under Secretary of Labor, and Warren
Christopher rose valiantly to the occasion, spending a whole wrangling
night working out compromises.

When, at the end, I was congratulated by my colleagues, I made it
clear that I was not proud of what we had achieved. My forebodings
proved well-founded. The Department of Commerce assigned a man
who had spent his working life in the textile industry to administer the
agreement, and he so applied it as to be almost as restrictive as manda-
tory quotas. 1 felt chagrin that I had persuaded the developing countries
to go along on the promise of orderly growth.

The UNCTAD

Even after my appointment as Under Secretary, I continued to keep
a vigilant eye on our foreign economic policy, to assure that we were
fighting effectively to maintain liberal access to the American market for
the products of other nations and particularly those of the Third World.
Meanwhile, the Third World countries organized themselves for a fron-
tal assault on markets of the great trading nations. The intellectual author
of this effort was an economist from Argentina, Dr. Raoul Prebisch. Dr.
Prebisch argued that Third World countries could best increase their
foreign exchange earnings by expanding their export of manufactures
produced with the comparative advantage of cheap labor. The indus-
trialized countries should, in turn, grant preferential access to their mar-
kets for such Third World manufactures.

I hough logical by the standards of a perfect world, the scheme
ignored political reality. The industrial nations would never give pref-
erence in their markets for any significant amount of labor-intensive,
manufactured or semi-manufactured products of Third World coun-
tries; the most we could possibly hope to do was to prevent discrimina-
tion against those products by quotas or specially high tariffs. The
protectionist lobbies were constantly mouthing the old bromide that the
American worker’s living standard would be destroyed if he had to com-
pete directly with the “slave labor” or “sweat-shop labor” of poor coun-
tries.

Yet, despite their political unreality, the Prebisch proposals supplied
the central theme for the first United Nations Trade and Development
Conference (UNCTAD), scheduled to be held in Geneva on March 23,
1964. That conference was a mass affair with representatives from 1 16
nations. I would formally head the American delegation and make the
initial American address on March 25. What, then, should I say? Veter-
ans of such international conferences urged me to employ the tradi-

i()4 The Kennedy Years

tional sympathetic waffle, and my colleagues in the State Department
and the White House were horrified when I announced that I intended
to make an honest, realistic statement to the conference. America, they
argued, must never appear negative and indifferent to the aspirations
of Third World nations; if we took an honest stance, other nations would
take advantage of our forthrightness with empty promises.

The latter part of that argument was undoubtedly true. Speaking on
the day preceding my speech, the French Finance Minister, Valery Gis-
card d’Estaing, proposed that world markets be organized so as to guar-
antee higher prices for the raw materials and agricultural commodities
of underdeveloped nations and that tariff reductions be negotiated to
give the semi-manufactures of those countries access to the markets of
advanced countries from which they purchased machinery and equip-
ment. It was odd to hear such piety from a country that still revered the
spirit of Colbert. But Giscard’s speech evoked applause, even though
most of the delegates knew nothing would come of it.

I was aware that the delegates expected the United States to offer
similarly generous-sounding promises. But I held to my commitment to
candor. As I had expected, the speech fell like cold rain, but I am sure
that the realism I injected at the outset saved the conference from even
more absurd and unachievable recommendations than was finally the
case. Not only the frankness of my speech but also its brevity differen-
tiated it from the bombast of Che Guevara. For forty-five minutes he
spoke with such emotion as to hold the conference in the palm of his
hand, then lost it completely during the next hour and a half. Guevara
was, as I later commented to my dear, long-winded friend Hubert Hum-
phrey, the “Humphrey of Latin America.”

When I returned to Geneva on June 10 to make a wind-up speech,
there was again a sense of great expectations, a pervasive hope that the
United States would, as so often in the past, produce some major and
generous proposals. I had, however, no new initiative to put forward
and I was not prepared to utter sanctimonious platitudes and make
promises we could not keep. So, to the surprise of everyone, including
my own delegation, I threw away my prepared speech and told the con-
ference to get to work. I pointed out that the huge assemblage had been
toiling for almost three months but had agreed on nothing. Rather than
have me take up their time, they should roll up their sleeves and finish
their business.

My speech shocked the delegations but failed to inspire useful action.
To prevent the conference from going down in history as a monument
of expensive futility, the delegation leaders concocted a Trade and
Development Board that would meet twice a year to spur the economic
growth of the poor nations. It was a mouse not a mountain and it could
not roar above a whisper. But an agreement to create a permanent

The Tradesman s Entrance to Foreign Policy 795

UNCTAD secretariat did lift hearts; it provided new international jobs
for Third World bureaucrats.

Perhaps the most significant result of the first UNCTAD conference
was the emergence of the so-called seventy-seven-nation Latin-Asian-
African bloc that would in subsequent years seek to promote that catch
phrase of the seventies — the New International Economic Order.

Neither my delegation nor some of my colleagues in the White House
were altogether happy that I had spoken so flatly, but I have never
regretted it. It was not that I was insensitive to the plight of Third World
countries; on the contrary, as I told Dr. Prebisch many years later, I
thought his program inherently reasonable and I would have liked to
see it given a fair run. Though wary about exceptions to the most-favored-
nation doctrine that might open the way to special interests, I saw logic
in the concept of the advanced countries opening their markets to Third
World manufacturers; the only problem was that they would never do
it, and I did not want to be a party to a fraud. To gain transient popu-
larity, great nations should not misinterpret the realities of their own
national politics. We had done that too often in the past.

iy. The Tradesmans Entrance to
Foreign Policy

With the expansion of the OEEC into the OECD, the Devel-
opment Assistance Group (DAG), which included America, could now
be incorporated in the OECD and renamed the Development Assistance
Committee (DAC). By the eccentric standards of bureaucratic custom,
to evolve from DAG to DAC was a mark of progress. The responsibilities
of DAG, which the DAC would now inherit, were to keep track of the
technical and development assistance provided the Third World by
individual Western countries — a necessary mechanism since the ex-
colonial powers often kept secret the aid provided their former depend-
encies. Not knowing how much, or the nature of, the aid any Third
World country might be receiving from other industrialized nations, we
could not effectively help with their development planning, nor could
we be sure that a recipient country was not using our aid merely to ser-
vice its debts to Paris.

I briefly indulged in a grandiose vision that, in addition to channel-
ing aid through international organizations such as the World Bank, we
might use an improved version of DAC to coordinate national aid. DAC
would then not only serve as a clearing house but would also help finance
developing countries by organizing syndicates of its members to make

ig6 The Kennedy Years

common grants or loans. Except for aid consortia for a few particularly
troubled countries, the concept proved fantasy. Changing the acronym
from DAG to DAC did little to transform the scope of the enterprise; it
remained little more than a secretariat scrambling to accumulate and
publish such statistics of national foreign aid contributions as it could
come by. If Macy’s does not tell Gimbels, France will certainly never tell
America the details of its aid to the African Francophone countries. Nor
has the concept of foreign aid ever been clearly defined. To what extent
is so-called “aid” simply a commercial credit? To what extent is it a polit-
ical bribe? To what extent is it a genuine contribution to economic suste-
nance or development? Those remain controversial questions.

japan

The DAG was one of the few transatlantic institutions that included
Japan, and I hoped it might provide leverage to help bring the Japanese
into the OECD. With Japan’s exuberant economic growth, it should begin
to play an expanding world role — initially economic then, ultimately,
political. Though no one in the early 1960s talked of “trilateralism,” that
was, in essence, what I had in mind.

The meeting to convert the DAG to the DAC was to be held in I okyo
on July 11 to July 13, 1961. I arrived in Okinawa on July 1 and spent an
afternoon and morning talking with General Paul Wyatt Caraway, whose
mother, Hattie Caraway, the first female Senator, had co-sponsored the
Equal Rights Amendment in 1943. General Caraway was a feisty little
man: brusque, precise, and widely regarded as a martinet. But he showed
sensitivity to the political problems we faced with the Japanese.

Until then, I had thought of Okinawa merely as a major World War
battleground. Now, observing our vast stores of supplies and the pro-
prietary manner in which our military administered the island, I thought
it preposterous that fifteen years after the war we should still be treating
it as our colony. I understood why our military wished to preserve
arrangements that enabled them to do what they pleased without inter-
ference from local authorities. Yet the situation was tailor-made to gen-
erate trouble between Tokyo and Washington. How could we decry the
colonial practices of our European allies yet persist in similar practices
in Okinawa?

Encouraged by Carl Kaysen, an old friend from Bombing Survey
days who was traveling with me as a representative of Mac Bundy’s White
House Staff, I sent the President a telegram describing the dangers
implicit in our position. Later, pursuant to that telegram, the Kaysen
Mission was dispatched to make a full study.

In Tokyo, Ruth and I enjoyed the warm and thoughtful hospitality
of Ambassador Edwin Reischauer and his brilliant and charming Japa-
nese wife, Haru. Reischauer, a distinguished Far Eastern scholar, had

The Tradesmans Entrance to Foreign Policy 797

been one of Chester Bowles’s nominees. The son of an American edu-
cator who had devoted his life to Japan, he had been born in Tokyo only
a few blocks from his wife’s birthplace, though they never met until many
years later in the United States. His appointment initially drew heavy
fire. Should the American ambassador to Japan be married to a Japa-
nese? But the two together had proved precisely the right team in the
right place at the right moment. I can think of no two people during
that period — still tense from war and defeat — who could have done so
much to consolidate American-Japanese relations.

Because I was the first high official of the new Kennedy Administra-
tion to visit Japan, Ruth and I were accorded almost embarrassingly
elaborate hospitality. The high point was Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda’s
party for us at Geihinkan, a government guesthouse in the Shirokane
section of I okyo. In effect, there were two dinners: the succulent shell-
fish fried in batter called tempura and the other components of a tradi-
tional Japanese dinner, then a Western-style dinner, where we sat on
chairs rather than on the floor. For entertainment, there were both Noh
and Kabuki performers. Since it was an exceptionally balmy evening, we
wandered happily after dinner across graceful bridges over lily ponds
scattered throughout the gardens. It never occurred to us that the Prime
Minister would later be attacked in the Japanese Diet for his extrava-
gance in providing such lavish entertainment to a mere Under Secretary
of State.

Between sessions of the DAC I met quietly with individual delega-
tions to gain their support for Japanese membership in the OECD. I
also reviewed with Japanese ministers the festering trade problems
between our two governments. I had already expounded my own
approach toward trade liberalization in the task force report on foreign
economic policy I had submitted to the newly elected President in
December. We should, I urged, use the European Economic Commu-
nity both as a justification for a major new round of trade negotiations
and a precedent for reducing tariffs by percentage cuts across the board
rather than the traditional item-by-item haggling.

The Trade Bill

Soon after I joined the State Department, I began to agitate for new
legislation to make this possible. A major round of trade discussions —
the first phase of the so-called “Dillon Round” — would soon be con-
cluded, with the result that over a period of years, tariffs would be cut
by an average of 10 percent; I was now determined to use the momen-
tum for much broader legislation. A new trade bill should, as I saw it,
not merely provide trade liberalization for its own sake, it should
encourage the buildup of a rational structure for the West’s economy.
At the same time, I was anxious to avoid the type of trade legislation that

ig 8 The Kennedy Years

might, by promising to reduce the common external tariff of the Com-
mon Market, provide the British opponents of accession with an excuse
for staying out of Europe. 1 For a while I toyed with the idea of postpon-
ing the legislation for a year until Britain had gained access. President
Kennedy wisely overruled my concerns and insisted that we go forward
without delay. 2

I had been involved in commercial policy matters for many years and
looked forward to leading the Congressional fight for the new legisla-
tion, but President Kennedy had other ideas. He had twice compli-
mented me on my appearance before Congressional committees, and I
was unaware of any reservations until one day he said to me, “Just a
suggestion, George; don’t give the committees the impression you’re too
well prepared. A Senator told me the other day that some of his col-
leagues thought you had too many answers. They don’t like a witness
that seems to know more than they do.”

It was a useful rebuke. Though I did not mean to appear cocky, I
enjoyed fencing with antagonistic Congressmen and Senators. I had the
advantage of total immersion in subjects that Congressional committee
members had only briefly encountered. Yet, as I discovered later, it was
not my obnoxious self-assurance that induced the President to select
Luther Hodges, the Secretary of Commerce, to lead the trade bill through
Congress, but Wilbur Mills, the powerful chairman of the Ways and
Means Committee, who insisted that Hodges, a former Governor of
North Carolina, would reassure industrialists. He was, they thought, on
their side, while the State Department, according to the perennial
mythology, was more concerned with improving our foreign political
relations than protecting American industry and agriculture.

As it turned out, the President’s choice was wise. In his bumbling but
forthright manner, Hodges convinced the committees that he wished
only to advance American business interests and that the proposed new
legislation was essential, since otherwise our exports could not compete
over the external tariff of the Common Market. I had known Hodges
ever since the days of the first Stevenson campaign, and we worked out
an agreed strategy. He would testify on the first day, leaving me to pick
up the pieces. The country was more prepared for the new legislation
than most of us had thought. It passed easily by a vote of 298 to 125 in
the House, and 78 to 8 in the Senate.

As a concession to Congress — and business — the negotiation of trade
legislation was taken away from the State Department. The President’s
Special Representative for Trade would now have overall charge of the
negotiation of all trade agreements. The President asked me to recom-
mend someone for that assignment who would seem sufficiently con-
servative to reassure Congress and the business community while still
firmly believing in liberal trade. 1 suggested Christian Herter, who, after
the death of Secretary Dulles, had served as Secretary of State under

The Tradesman s Entrance to Foreign Policy 799

President Eisenhower. He was a courtly New Englander, gentle in man-
ner and with high integrity. Since he was a Republican, his appointment
would not be regarded as partisan.

Key to successful negotiation was the selection of an effective assis-
tant to Herter to do the actual bargaining. A formidable assignment, it
required persistence, tough-mindedness, and the fortitude to stand up
to industry and labor pressure; it also meant spending an unpredictable
number of years in the pleasant but constricted atmosphere of Geneva
wrangling with other negotiators who were feeling equal but opposite
domestic pressures. Our negotiator should be reasonably fluent at least
in French and German. He must understand, and sympathize with, the
basic tenets of liberal trade policy.

For that assignment W. Michael Blumenthal was uniquely qualified.
Fleeing Germany with his family, he had spent his adolescence as a state-
less person in Shanghai. Blumenthal had learned the harsh ways of a
huge, exotic city, been interned for two years by the Japanese, and had
finally found his way to America after the Japanese surrender. Making
his way through the University of California at Berkeley — in part by
working during summers as a shill in a Las Vegas gambling house (an
excellent preparation for his later career as Secretary of the Treasury)—
he had acquired a Ph.D. in economics at Princeton, taught briefly, had a
brief but successful experience in business, and, with the advent of the
Kennedy Administration, joined the State Department’s Economic
Bureau. I here, as his unusual competence became evident, I gave him
increasingly more difficult assignments.

During my early months in the State Department I was continually
told by my colleagues that one proposal or another must be rejected
because it “was not State Department policy,” and I had formed the habit
of replying, “Well, it is from now on.” That had been the case with com-
modity agreements, where our traditional position of automatic rejec-
tion seemed to me far too rigid. I had no illusion that such agreements
worked effectively. Member countries would either break the rules and
overproduce, or the scheme would be upset by the vagaries of wars,
weather, or some other natural or unnatural disaster. Nevertheless, Third
World countries were loudly agitating for income stability and for an
improvement in the terms of trade (which all of them regarded as per-
sistently adverse), and it was, I thought, time to reexamine the whole
question.

So I assigned that task to Blumenthal, watching with interest and
admiration as he wrestled with an international coffee agreement, a long-
term cotton textile agreement, a cocoa agreement, a tin agreement, and
other commodity arrangements. Thus, when the choice came to select a
negotiator for the Kennedy Round, I felt no qualms in overriding the
saci eel pi inciples of seniority and persuading the President to accept
Michael Blumenthal, then only thirty-seven years old. The task before

200 The Kennedy Years

him was exacting and formidable: to carry through to success a negoti-
ation involving many nations that was to last five years. He performed
brilliantly.

First Signs of Detente

Implicit in the Kennedy Administration’s Grand Design was the hope
that, as the West grew more cohesive, America could begin “to build
bridges” to the Soviet Union. In October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis
had cleared the air, and the following year, President Kennedy began to
probe for areas of common interest between the United States and the
Soviet Union. That initiative led Walter Lippmann to begin writing about
the possibilities oi detente long before it had become a household word.' 5

In a commencement address at American University on June 10,
1963, Kennedy tried to put America’s position in more rational terms
than Dulles’s per fervid anti-Communist jihad. What the United States
sought, he said, was “not a P ax- Americana enforced ... by American
weapons of war . . . but peace for all men” and “peace for all time.”
Though acknowledging that the dreamer’s “absolute, infinite concepts
of universal peace and good-will’’ were merely invitations to “discour-
agements and incredulity,” he saw the chance for a practical approach
to peace “based not on a sudden revolution in human nature, but on a
gradual evolution in human institutions.” To be sure, there was a wide-
spread feeling “that it is useless to speak of world peace . . . until the
leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude,” but “I
believe,” he said, “we can help them to do it,’’ though to assist that pro-
cess “we must reexamine our own attitude. . . . History teaches us that
enmities between nations . . . do not last forever; the tide of time and
events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between
nations.” 4 Finally, he stated emphatically that, though the United States
would never start a war, we would be prepared for war if others initiated
it.

Following the speech, the President went to Europe to reassure our
European allies but avoided the customary Cold War rhetoric. On the
night he Hew back to Washington, word came that the Russians had
expressed a willingness to negotiate a limited test ban treaty. I met the
President when his plane arrived at Andrews Field on July 2, 1963, and
gave him a hastily dictated memorandum that tried to interpret the Soviet
announcement. To the extent that historical guideposts ever mean any-
thing (they rarely mean much), that message marked the beginning of
the detente Lippmann had foreshadowed. During the next few months,
the President’s search for areas of common interest produced tangible
results: not only a test ban treaty, but a consular treaty, the ending of
the India-Pakistan War through Soviet mediation, and, finally, the sale

201

The Tradesman s Entrance to Foreign Policy

of American wheat to Moscow. That last transaction was to occupy a
considerable part of my time for an intense period in 1963.

Soviet Wheat Sale

For several years there had been poor harvests on the Russian steppes,
and the New Lands experiment had been disastrous. The Soviet govern-
ment had found it impossible to achieve efficient agricultural production
through collective farms and Communist methods, and the Soviet peo-
ple were faced with a serious grain shortfall. Moscow had, therefore,
bought a substantial amount of wheat from Canada and Australia and,
through indirect channels, had indicated a wish to buy some of the sev-
eral hundred million bushels of surplus wheat we held in storage. I saw
no reason why we should not make a profitable deal with the Soviet
Union, but some Americans — even some in public life — still felt that if
we bought or sold goods across the Iron Curtain we might become the
dupes of Soviet commissars. 1 hat puzzled me: Freudian psychoanalysts,
I pointed out, could have a held day spinning theories to explain the
prevailing sense of guilt and fear of contamination from commercial
dealings with the East. I thought the reaction out of character; it insulted
the skill and integrity of our Yankee traders, contradicted the experi-
ence of our own history, and seemed an over-reaction to Marx’s conten-
tion that politics in capitalist societies were always responsive to greed.

From the colonial period down to the First World War, America had
depended heavily on foreign trade. In 1812, our insistence on the pro-
tection of neutral trading rights had brought war with England. During
our Civil War, there had been substantial cross-border “trading with the
enemy. But by midcentury, our domestic market had greatly expanded,
while our foreign trade accounted for hardly more than 5 percent of
our national income; so long as we ran a surplus in our balance of exter-
nal accounts we could afford a certain margin for moralism and ideol-
ogy*

Reflecting the prevailing bigotry, Congress had passed an amend-
ment to the Agricultural Act of 1961, expressing opposition to the sale
of subsidized agricultural commodities to unfriendly nations, but, though
troublesome, it was only a declaration of “the sense of the Congress”
without binding effect. Applied to the proposed wheat sale, it made no
sense. We had for many years been selling the Russians nonsurplus
agricultural commodities and a dozen other items. They would not ben-
efit by the subsidy since it did not go to the foreign buyer but to the
American wheat farmer, regardless of where and whether the wheat was
sold. Still it was a handy partisan issue and some Republicans could never
resist a chance to heckle the Administration. The President, they indig-
nantly complained, had not adequately consulted Congress; he had

202

The Kennedy Years

merely informed them prior to October 9, when he announced his
decision to go forward with the negotiations.

The exploitation of domestic bigotry provided useful leverage to
interests seeking commercial advantage. Under pressure from ship own-
ers and maritime unions, the President agreed that if we sold wheat to
the Russians at subsidized world prices, it would have to be carried in
American bottoms. In addition, since the Soviet’s gold reserves were being
drawn down faster than their mines could replace them, Moscow was
asking for credit which raised a separate problem.

The Soviet proposal involved only 65 million bushels of surplus
wheat — a small amount relative to our several hundred million bushels
in storage. But we had to consider the initial sale as opening the way for
later purchases that would improve our balance of payments. In addi-
tion, though the Soviets were clearly not so desperate that they would
grant political concessions for wheat, our willingness to sell on normal
terms would signify to Moscow that an improved climate of opinion could
be mutually beneficial. Substantial preparatory work had gone into the
negotiations. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson, who understood the
habits of Moscow, sounded out the Soviet ambassador and, on October
5, was told that the Soviets would be interested in buying wheat on cus-
tomary commercial terms and at the world market price. Much to my
surprise, the ambassador did not object to the use of American ships,
though American shipping rates were the highest in the world.

President Kennedy asked me to lead the negotiation with the assis-
tance of Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., the Under Secretary of Commerce. On
November 21, 1963, the Soviet purchasing mission arrived, led by First
Deputy Foreign Trade Minister Sergei Borisov, a genial, straightfor-
ward fonctionnaire. It took no more than one meeting to discover that, in
their own confusion, the Soviets had confused us. Some political com-
missar must have decided to use American ships to avoid problems with
our longshoremen and port security restrictions. Someone — perhaps a
commercial commissar — must have pointed out later that American
shipping was prohibitively expensive. (1 oday the poor political commis-
sar is probably running a power station in Siberia.)

Our talks quickly became a protracted haggle. The Soviets were quite
unable to understand how American longshoremen could refuse to load
Soviet ships that might be sent to lift the wheat. “I don’t understand,
Borisov said, “how your unions can be so unpatriotic as to defy the gov-
ernment. In my country, when the government wants something done
as a matter of policy, our unions do it, and nobody asks any questions.
Though I gave Borisov a lecture on the beauties and glories of our
American free labor movement, it made no impression. 1 he Soviet
Communist party represented the workers, and the unions could not
press claims against the wishes of the party. (It foreshadowed the argu-
ment in Poland two decades later.)

The Tradesman s Entrance to Foreign Policy 203

I regretted that President Kennedy had so quickly capitulated to the
longshoremen s demands — and I think he did also. No private organi-
zation should be able to thwart government policy from motives of cup-
idity cynically disguised in patriotic clothing. Once we decided to sell
wheat to Russia we should have offered Moscow the same terms and
conditions as any other buyer.

I was fascinated by the puritanical attitude of some members of the
Congress. I hough on humanitarian grounds they would give wheat to
starving Russians, they felt its sale was immoral. Yet we did not establish
a moral principle by imposing discriminatory conditions on that sale; we
simply appeared cheap and grasping. I had had previous experience
with the avidity of the greedy for wrapping themselves in the flag. At
the time of the wheat negotiations there was an organized campaign to
boycott all cigarettes that included even a tiny amount of Yugoslav
tobacco. A little later, when the Soviet Union proposed to bid on some
turbines to be used in a United States publicly owned hydroelectric
facility, the Soviet producers were excluded from the bidding on the
ground that the installation of Soviet equipment might “jeopardize
security.” A candid American official was quoted as admitting that he
advocated rejecting the Soviet request because it would “cast a shadow
on American technology.”

In the end, we finally reached an agreement to sell the Russians about
half as much wheat as originally requested with the concession that the
Soviet Union could lift 50 percent of the wheat in foreign flag ships. But,
limited as it was, that sale was not happily received in all sectors of the
Administration. Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson declared — as I
learned later — that “the wheat deal was the worst political mistake we
made in the foreign policy of this Administration.”

Since that first wheat sale in 1963, sentiments have shifted 180
degiees. American farmers are now so eager to sell wheat to Russia that
Piesident Carter triggered a farm belt revolt when he imposed a wheat
embargo in reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, only to have
Piesident Reagan stultify his own anti-Soviet ideology by withdrawing it
shortly after assuming office. Moralism has given way to pragmatism;
doctrine, to politics.

The Dollar Gap

Even by the early 1960s, we Americans could no longer afford the
luxury of refusing to sell our produce abroad merely to prove our piety;
our financial reserves were no longer increasing as they had been in the
late 1940s and early 1950s, when I worked with Jean Monnet on the
French Plan and with Leon Blum on French financial problems. At that
time, my economist friends solemnly shook their heads over an intract-
able dollar gap that reflected the inability of major European nations

204 The Kennedy Years

to earn foreign exchange. Because America had such a wide technolog-
ical lead, European nations would, they predicted, continue to suffer
balance of payments deficits, since the problem was “structural. 1 hat
was like telling a sick man he had an inoperable cancer; the world would
have to accept the dollar gap as a fact of life or death.

By 1963 the perspective had changed drastically. Instead of piling
up reserves, America was running deficits in its own balance of pay-
ments. Those deficits, first appearing in 1958, had persistently increased.
The danger was no longer a “dollar gap” or dollar shortage, but a dollar
glut. Our net outflow of gold between 1950 and 1962, aggregating over
$8 billion, had reduced our gold reserves to about $16 billion; mean-
while, foreign countries had increased their short-term dollar claims by
over $17 billion to the point where they now aggregated $25 billion. As
chairman of the task force on the balance of payments appointed by
President Kennedy prior to inauguration, I had been given a crash course
in international monetary policy by the finest monetary experts in
America, including Paul Samuelson, Robert Triffin, Robert Roosa (of
the New York Federal Reserve Bank, later to become the Kennedy
Administration’s Under Secretary of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs),
Richard Gardner, Otto Eckstein, Edward Bernstein, Peter Kenen, and
Joseph Pechman. Key features of the report, which I drafted with the
help of Myer Rashish, have been noted by Dr. Robert Solomon of
Brookings.

The report recommended that the Secretary of State arrange for informal
consultations with American companies before they made substantial overseas
investments. . . . It recommended legislation embodying proposals for systematic
machinery to restrain cost-price spirals. It recommended a change in the U.S.
agricultural program from price support to income support, to enhance the
competitiveness of U.S. farm products in world markets. It proposed that coun-
tries accumulating foreign exchange as a direct result of expenditures by other
countries in furtherance of the common defense or of development assistance
should take a series of measures to increase imports and other payments abroad.
But, surprisingly and without explanation, the report rejected the idea that the
United States should urge Germany to revalue its currency.

The Ball report also suggested study of the desirability and feasibility of giv-
ing a gold-value guaranty to foreign official holders of dollars, but it explicitly
refrained from recommending such a step. Finally, in a section entitled “Inter-
national Monetary Reform,” it suggested study within the government of alter-
native ways of meeting the world’s growing reserve needs, and it summarized a
series of possible reforms, ranging all the way to a world central bank, along the
lines of the proposals of Robert Triffin, who was a member of the Task Force.
There is reason to think that the details on international monetary reform were
not to the liking of Secretary of the Treasury Dillon; he was quoted in Fortune as
saying, in reaction to reform proposals such as those of Robert Triffin or E. M.
Bernstein, “The United States should continue as banker for the world .” 5

The Tradesman s Entrance to Foreign Policy 205

Despite Secretary Dillon’s disagreement, I tried to promote the accep-
tance of the report’s recommendations.

Balance of Pay ments Obsession

President Kennedy’s brooding concern with the problem of our
depleting gold reserves reflected the influence of his father, Joseph P.
Kennedy. As a brilliant speculator and market manipulator, the elder
Kennedy was obsessively conservative with regard to public finance; to
him our gold resources were a significant measure of our national
strength and authority. Those of us struggling to keep the problem in
perspective were apprehensive whenever the President was planning to
go to Hyannis Port for a weekend, and the President, I thought, some-
times shared that apprehension. He feared that his father would scold
him for leading the country toward destruction by permitting balance of
payments deficits and the reduction in our gold stocks. So, whenever the
President returned from Hyannis Port, we braced ourselves for a ser-
mon on gold and the hellfire awaiting us if we did not promptly correct
the balance of payments deficit. Twice when I argued with the President
about some aspect of the problem, he said to me ruefully, “All right,
George, I follow you, but how can I ever explain that to my father?”

In time, the President’s increasing obsession with our worrisome bal-
ance of payments threatened to produce serious distortions of policy.
Compared with our later experience when, in 1977, for example, the
deficit in our overall balance of accounts amounted to $20 billion, the
deficits of $2 billion we were then running now seem almost de minimis.
But at that time, Americans were not yet adjusted to the idea that Amer-
ica should be other than a surplus nation.

To cope with the problem, the President established a Balance of
Payments Committee under the chairmanship of Secretary of the Treas-
ury Dillon, which included, among others, Secretary McNamara; the
chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Walter Hel-
ler; and the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, William McChes-
ney Martin. I was the State Department member. Management of the
problem on a week-to-week basis was entrusted to Robert Roosa, who,
as a financial expert, had been part of my task force. During 1961, Roosa
engaged in a series of dexterous operations and negotiations to build
some short-term defenses for our gold position; with considerable inge-
nuity, he devised a series of so-called “Roosa Bonds” and developed an
extensive network of currency swaps and bilateral arrangements. Mean-
while, our committee sought, by a series of improvisations, to reduce the
effect of our increasing balance of payments deficits. Though it was blas-
phemy to philosophers of economic development, we tied most foreign
aid to purchases in the United States; overseas military expenditures

2 o 6 The Kennedy Years

were cut, largely by bringing home the families of our troops in Ger-
many, and there was talk that we might have to reduce the size of our
troop deployments. That was fodder for Europe’s neutralists, who ques-
tioned the firmness of our defense commitments.

Still, more and more, the pressures generated by the President’s bal-
ance-of-payments preoccupation threatened to drive us toward restric-
tions and protectionism. The duty-free allowance for goods brought back
by returning tourists was drastically reduced, and “Buy America” pro-
visions were tightened to the point where domestic goods had to cost 50
percent more than similar imports before the Defense Department could
buy abroad.

I was not happy at our heavy reliance on purely technical manipula-
tion among the central banks, and I enlisted the support of Walter Hel-
ler, together with another member of the Council of Economic Advisers,
Professor James Tobin, and Carl Kaysen in the White House, to press
for a more fundamental approach. Concern about that evanescent con-
cept called “international confidence” had begun to affect even our
domestic policies. I resented the sanctimonious, school-masterish scold-
ing of European bankers, since our deficits resulted in part because we
were carrying an inordinate share of the Free World’s defense. So my
colleagues and I argued that we should not leave our gold stock to the
mercy of European bankers and speculators but should develop multi-
lateral agreements among governments to insulate the United States from
excessive gold losses — while we worked toward a longer-term equilib-
rium. As I put it in a memorandum I wrote to the President on July 24,
1962,

I am convinced that our Atlantic allies will never behave in a more enlight-
ened manner so long as our international financial problem is considered as
something to be resolved according to a special body of arcane rules to satisfy a
special priesthood — something to be resolved outside the general body of polit-
ical problems that exist among the Free World powers. If we are to avoid trouble
and humiliation, we must raise the negotiations to a political level. We must solve
this problem as we solve others — by cooperation with those leaders of the major
Atlantic powers who have political responsibility for the maintenance of effective
Free World relations and who, unlike central bankers, regard our exertions for
Free World strength and security not as reckless and imprudent conduct but as
vital to the survival of their own countries.

I pointed out that, since the war, we had given the Western Euro-
pean nations in outright grants roughly $40 billion, which was closer to
$50 billion in then current value. Europe needed a secure dollar just as
much as we did, and constant fear of a flight from the dollar could not
be tolerated. We were attempting to improve our payments figures by
means that often involved distortions of policy out of all proportion to
the results; thus we had created an impression of weakness and insecu-

The Tradesman s Entrance to Foreign Policy 207

rity that was seriously eroding our authority and bargaining power —
and our freedom of action and decision.”

I he pressure to sustain the “confidence” of private financial circles
was, I wrote, “confining us in a constantly shrinking and more uncom-
fortable box. . . . The result is that every currency speculator in Europe
regards himself as a self-appointed financial adviser to the United States
government. If we were to break out of the box, we had to “entrust the
dollar, and the other convertible currencies, not to the daily whims of
private and official confidence’ but to a structure of long-run reciprocal
assurances by governments.” That meant that we must tell our Euro-
pean allies: “. . . if we are to continue to carry our heavy share of the
free world s burdens, we can do so only under conditions where our
exertions in the common cause do not imperil the dollar and, in fact, the
whole international payments system.”

Under existing arrangements, I pointed out, even cutting down our
balance of payments deficits would not eliminate the danger that one or
more central banks might suddenly decide to turn dollars into gold. It
was a mistake for us to try to maintain “confidence” merely by unilateral
efforts; we should seek multilateral agreement at the political level to
insulate ourselves from the danger of excessive gold losses. If we per-
sisted in our present effort “of trying to bring about payments equilib-
rium under forced draft,” we would find ourselves pursuing “lines of
policy that would undermine years of effort to build a world of expand-
ing trade.”

I o get out of the present predicament, we should reach a prompt
political agreement that would “provide effective interim defenses against
the runs on our gold supply” and thus give us the time necessary to deal
with the basic payments balance problem in an orderly manner. Ulti-
mately, “we should seek a thoroughgoing revision of the payments sys-
tem that will make provision for increasing requirements for liquidity
over the longer future without undue dependence either on gold or
deficits for key currency countries.” My comment foreshadowed the
increased liquidity later achieved by the creation, in 1969, of SDRs, a
kind of international money evidenced by an entry in a member coun-
try s bank balance with the International Monetary Fund, to be made
available to each country in proportion to its IMF quota.

My memoranda were written when the international markets were
filled with rumors that President de Gaulle might be preparing to exert
political leverage on the United States by withdrawing gold from our
country. My efforts to broaden our approach to the problem in time
created some tension between Douglas Dillon and me, which worried
the President. But as the drain on our gold supply again began to increase
toward the end of 1962, even the Treasury was beginning to recognize
that additional multilateral understandings were necessary for a longer-
term solution.

2 o 8 The Kennedy Years

1 6 . The Mystique of a Grand Design

The young movers and shakers of the Kennedy Administra-
tion thought of themselves primarily as pragmatists, well equipped to
resolve America’s emergent international problems with flair and imag-
ination. Though they had, if anything, a surfeit of theories regarding
the economic development of the Third World, they had fewer settled
views on the structure of relations among the Western industrialized
democracies.

Evolution of a Concept

Still, they were sympathetic to what was, to me, a familiar idea devel-
oped during my years with Jean Monnet: the long-term objective of
building what we referred to as a European-American “partnership." To
be more than a metaphor, such a partnership required a new European
political structure since, fragmented into moderate sized nations, Europe
was far less than the sum of its parts. No longer possessing world-wide
colonial systems, the once great European powers could no longer play
in the global league with the two continent-wide nations — the United
States and the USSR. A world power needed vast resources to meet the
requirements of scope and scale in a world shaped by fast transport,
instant communications, mass production, and increasingly sophisti-
cated technology. Though the peoples of Western Europe commanded
aggregate resources approaching our own, that aggregate was, in politi-
cal and military terms, a meaningless statistic. Lacking a common politi-
cal structure through which they could mobilize and deploy resources in
response to a common will, they could play only a marginal role beyond
the boundaries of their own continent.

The creation of first the Coal and Steel Community and then the
European Economic Community, had set Europe on the way toward
integrating its national economies. Six European countries — France, West
Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg — had
organized a common market in which goods and services could move
freely across national boundaries, and institutions had been established
at Brussels to shape common rules and supervise the Community’s activ-
ities. Blueprints had been drawn to enable the central institutions of the
Common Market, particularly the Commission of the Community, to
acquire increasing political power that might lead, by gradual evolution,
toward something approaching confederation. Americans, 1 had long
believed, had much to gain by encouraging Europeans to develop their

The Mystique of a Grand Design 209

own European identity and institutions. Europe as a collectivity could
share world responsibility as our “equal partner.”

Soon the Kennedy Administration began to incorporate the partner-
ship concept in the body of doctrine they were evolving, which suggested
to the columnist Joseph Kraft that that concept was the Kennedy
Administration’s “Grand Design.” 1 America would benefit by having a
strong ally. T he trade disadvantages of having American goods sub-
jected to the Community’s common external tariff should be more than
offset by the increased volume of trade resulting from Europe’s eco-
nomic expansion. Even more important, we Americans could afford to
pay some economic price for a strong Europe that would sustain its share
of world responsibilities. Obviously, we could not expect a united Europe
always to agree with us. But if Europe expressed views of its own, so
much the better, we certainly had no monopoly of wisdom.

Absence of the British

The missing piece in the European jigsaw map was Great Britain,
which had so far refused to join either the Coal and Steel Community
or the Euiopean Economic Community. Though disappointed, Jean
Monnet predicted that London would sooner or later fall in line. “The
British know a fait accompli when they see one,” he would say, “and once
the Community is operating successfully, Britain will join.” Monnet knew
the British about as well as he knew the French and Americans, since he
had worked closely with all three during two world wars.

It was easy to understand why Britain failed to accept the new reality.
Not only did it carry the heavy baggage of history, but it saw the Com-
munity as a club of defeated nations; Great Britain and the United States
had fought the war together and had won. Besides, the British felt more
at home with Americans, who spoke a quaint variant of their own lan-
guage. Disliking the Germans and mistrusting the French, they thought
of their undefined and frequently disavowed “special relationship” with
the United States as a fundamental source of prestige and security and
shied away from commitments that might undercut it.

In a memorandum to President Kennedy in May 1961, I pointed out
that Britain’s aloofness reflected its long habit of balance-of- power poli-
tics. Recalling Napoleon and the continental system, Prime Minister
Macmillan had told President Eisenhower in i960 that “should France
and Germany go down the road toward a unified Western Europe, Brit-
ain, in the long run, had no choice but to lead a peripheral alliance against
them. Such anachronistic nonsense showed that Great Britain had not
yet adjusted to reality; no longer an empire, it was now merely an island
nation on which the sun not only set, but set every evening— provided
one could see it for the rain.

210 The Kennedy Years

Under Macmillan, Britain both kept its distance from the European
Community and seriously tried to “lead a peripheral alliance” against
the Six. By proposing that the Community become part of a broad but
loose Free Trade Association, it sought to transform the Community
into a purely commercial arrangement. 1 hwarted in that maneuver, it
then organized the so-called “Outer Seven” countries (the United King-
dom, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Austria, and Portugal) in
what was known as the European Free 1 rade Association (EF1 A). FETA
offered no redeeming benefits in the form of economic integration nor
any promise of political unity; it was merely a commercial ttading bloc
that discriminated against the United States and all nonmember coun-
tries. It excluded agricultural trade, did not provide for a common
external tariff, and established only rudimentary institutional arrange-
merits.

In time, as all “good Europeans” predicted, EFIA became a head-
ache even for the British, and, as Britain s economy declined while the
continents flourished, her most astute businessmen and intellectuals
began to recognize that, sooner or later, the United Kingdom would
have to join the Common Market. Particularly among the senior civil
servants, there was a growing sense of urgency; time was not working
on Britain’s side. The statistics were eloquent and unanswerable; the
member countries of the Common Market were enjoying a far faster
and more dynamic growth than a sluggish Britain an inescapable leal-
ity even Prime Minister Macmillan could no longer ignore. Abandoning
the defensive concept of a “peripheral alliance, he told Canadian Pie-
mier John Diefenbaker that it was better that the United Kingdom
should join the European Economic Community and become a live part-
ner in a growing trade association than go bankrupt on its own.

I watched with increasing hope as Europe’s fait accompli began subtly
to change British views. An enduring European edifice could never be
built merely on a Franco-German rapprochement ; yet an enduring struc-
ture was essential. Germany must be incorporated into a European
framework to neutralize aberrant forces generated by the ii redentist
desire for reunification. So long as the United Kingdom remained out-
side the Common Market, it was like a giant lodestone exerting uneven
degrees of attraction on individual member states of the Six, and e\en
on individual factions within those member states.

Even before the inauguration of President Kennedy, some of my
British friends had told me that the Macmillan goveinment was having
second thoughts about Britain’s isolation from Europe. Once in office, I
saw my responsibilities as twofold: I would encourage the Biitish to take
the plunge, but, at the same time, I must not let insular British elements
destroy the institutional potential of the Rome Treaty and turn the
European Community into a mere trading bloc. I had no idea how quickly
I would have to face the issue.

The Mystique of a Grand Design

21 1

Meeting with Edward Heath

Toward the latter part of March 1961, when I was in London for a
meeting of the Development Assistance Group, the Joint Permanent
Secretary of the Treasury, Sir Frank Lee, an old wartime friend, invited
me to meet with Edward Heath, the Lord Privy Seal, and a group of
British civil servants. I knew that Heath was regarded as more sympa-
thetic to the Common Market than his predecessor, Reginald Maudling,
but I had never met him. I was instantly impressed by his cordiality,
frankness, and absence of foreign office cant.

Heath opened the meeting by reviewing developments since July
i960, when Great Britain had decided to jettison the original free trade
area proposals. Thoughtful Britons were increasingly worried that the
economic division of Europe might create a political split. Chancellor
Adenauer had told Prime Minister Macmillan that he felt it politically
urgent to resolve the issue of Britain’s relations with the continent, and
the two had agreed on official-level meetings to develop the basis for a
solution.

Provided an overall settlement could be found to take care of the
Commonwealth, agriculture, and EFTA problems, the United Kingdom
government was, Heath said, now ready to accept a common, or har-
monized, tariff. That was a basic change in attitude. Equally important,
the United Kingdom was prepared to accept any institutions that were
“consequent upon the establishment of a common, or harmonized, tar-
iff. f inally, it was ready for the Six to negotiate with the Commonwealth
countries regarding the reduction or elimination of British preferences,
although arrangements would have to be made respecting the prefer-
ences now enjoyed by overseas territories in the United Kingdom and
the Common Market. His government, said Heath, now wished to explore
whether there was a basis for negotiation.

At that point, Heath left to attend a House of Commons debate on
Laos. Sir frank Lee then took the chair. The Danes, Norwegians, and
Austrians, who maintained the largest trade with the Common Market
Six of any of the seven EFTA countries, were, Sir Frank told us, pressing
Britain hard to work out some arrangements between the Six and Seven.

I he Dutch and Italians, on the other hand, were more concerned that
an economic division in Europe might lead to a political split. What was
America’s position?

We had, I replied, consistently supported European integration. Some
form of German-French rapprochement was imperative; a structure must
be built to assure Germany’s retention in the West, particularly in view
of the unpredictability implicit in the fact that the powerful leaders of
both Germany and France were both old men. As the Germans grew
increasingly self-confident, they might be tempted to move indepen-
dently in search of reunification.

212 The Kennedy Years

The United States, I said, was prepared for some temporary sacrifice
of commercial interests to facilitate the political promise of the EEC. We
regretted that the United Kingdom had not joined the Rome Treaty;
the political genius of the British would have greatly accelerated prog-
ress. Now — particularly in light of our balance of payments deficits — we
could accept the added discrimination resulting from British entry only
if it would reinforce the political character of the EEC. We opposed the
merger of two preferential systems for Africa — the British Common-
wealth and the French system. Preferential arrangements not only
encouraged the expansion of uneconomic production and the drawing
of distorted trade lines, but if expanded to cover the whole Common
Market, would create major problems for outside producers, such as
Latin America. Though we could not precisely define our position
regarding a hypothetical set of facts, I doubted that Britain was yet ready
for a solution that would fully satisfy United States requirements.

Sir Frank Lee then put the question directly: “Does the United States
want Britain to join the Common Market? Might America perhaps even
welcome some derogation in the agricultural field, since United States
trade would benefit if the EEC did not adopt a common agricultural
policy?’’

My assistant, Robert Schaetzel, then interjected that he thought a
common agricultural policy essential to the development of the EEC,
since there had to be a balance between industry and agriculture. In
answer to my expressed concern that derogations to take care of Com-
monwealth trade might involve the expansion of preferences, Sir Frank
replied that he did not foresee increased preferences outside of Europe,
except in the field of tropical products. Other problems with the Com-
monwealth primarily involved temperate foodstuffs where the United
Kingdom could either continue duty-free treatment or agree to some
change.

I then emphasized the importance we attached not only to “noncom-
mercial’’ aspects of the European Economic Community, but also to the
Community’s institutions established in Brussels. Sir Frank responded
encouragingly that his government had made a serious study of the non-
trade aspects of the Rome Treaty, and, with the “changed temper’’ in
the United Kingdom, he felt the government was now prepared to go
farther in this respect than ever before.

The EEC’s institutions should not, I insisted, become mere techno-
cratic bodies; they should continue to develop politically. If Britain joined
the EEC, it should be on the understanding that the present institutions
did not form a completed edifice but would continue to evolve and that
the Rome Treaty was not a “frozen document” but a “process.

Sir Frank replied that he fully understood the significance of what I
had been saying. Although the movement toward political federation in

The Mystique of a Grand Design 213

Europe had been checked for the moment, it would later resume its
forward march; he, himself, did not shrink intellectually from the idea
of full political union. I answered that, if the British joined the EEC in
the proper spirit, “the internal logic of the movement would carry them
along toward the ultimate goal.”

Sir Frank summarized this dialogue for Edward Heath on his return.
Heath seemed impressed by the spirit and content of the conversation,
acknowledging that the proposed steps would require a major United
Kingdom political decision. The British were still not clear whether the
French wanted them in Europe. I again emphasized that the United
States would regard an unqualified British move into Europe as a major
contribution to Western cohesion.

Since we had covered a great deal of previously uncharted ground,
I emerged exhilarated but feeling as though I had bailed out of an air-
plane without knowing the terrain underneath. Both Heath and Lee had
gone much farther than I had expected — but then, so had I. The Presi-
dent had given me no mandate to state American policy with such assur-
ance; I had never reviewed the nuances of the subject with him, nor even
asked his views on the critical questions Heath and I had covered. Thus,
in describing the American position, I was not sure whether I was mak-
ing American policy or interpreting it.

Nor were my colleagues uniformly happy at the line I had taken. I
remember particularly Joseph Greenwald, one of the ablest men in the
American embassy in London, upbraiding me for encouraging Britain
to move toward Europe. Having long watched British maneuvers to water
down the European institutions and to undercut European efforts toward
unity, he felt that I had given them too much encouragement. He implied,
without saying so explicitly, that he did not believe Britain would ever
play more than a foot-dragging role in Europe, resisting any move toward
political unity.

Macmillan s Washington Visit

Since my meeting with Heath on March 30 had obviously been
arranged in preparation for Prime Minister Macmillan’s visit to Wash-
ington, which was to begin on April 4, 1961, I quickly sought to prepare
President Kennedy for the forthcoming discussions. The Prime Minis-
ter, I wrote in a memorandum to the President, probably still hoped to
solve the problem by a “traditional British-type compromise that would
give the UK the best of both worlds — the full commercial advantages of
a loose association with the Common Market without any economic or
political involvement in the Continent.” However, I pointed out that se-
nior British civil servants had lost faith in that course and would be
cheering for the President to disabuse the Prime Minister of such wish-

214 The Kennedy Years

ful thinking. If we forced Macmillan to recognize that no easy compro-
mise was possible, he and his government would then have to decide
whether to stay aloof from the Six or make a full commitment to Europe.

In that connection, I pointed out that, in the course of my London
visit, I had also gone to Bonn to see the German Economic Minister,
Ludwig Erhard, as well as the Defense Minister, Joseph Strauss. Ger-
many was well along with two major postwar projects: the rebuilding of
her economy and the creation of a modern military establishment. Sooner
or later an increasingly self-confident post-Adenauer Germany might be
tempted toward an independent bilateral negotiation with the Kremlin,
looking toward reunification. If Britain remained aloof, such men as
Erhard and Strauss, who did not share Adenauer’s commitment to a
Franco-German rapprochement, might exploit the “division of Europe” as
an excuse for breaking free from the Six, but if the British should whole-
heartedly join the Six, the Community could furnish the glue to bind
Germany irrevocably to the West.

In Washington on the morning of April 1, as we sat across the cabi-
net table from our British visitors, almost the first question Prime Min-
ister Macmillan asked the President was how he and the American
government would react if Britain applied to join the European Com-
munity. President Kennedy responded briefly, then said, “Ell ask Under
Secretary Ball to reply to your question.” I then repeated what I had
said to Heath in London — that America would welcome it if Britain
should apply for full membership in the Community, explicitly recog-
nizing that the Rome Treaty was not merely a static document but a
process leading toward political unification. I elaborated upon this theme
at some length, noting the dangers of a mere commercial arrangement
that would drain the EEC of political content. The Prime Minister seemed
on the whole pleased and satisfied.

The following evening, April 6 , during a dinner at the British
embassy, the Prime Minister twice took me aside for private conversa-
tions. Despite his reputation for imperturbability, he seemed excited,
speaking with enthusiasm about the new President and the people around
him “who all seem to be full of such ideas and drive.” I mentioned the
enormous help we had received from Sir Frank Lee and that I had had
a long and searching talk with Heath and Lee on the Common Market.
“But, of course, I know all about that,” he replied. “Could you possibly
think I wotild have spoken so freely if I had not known all you said to
Lee and Heath?” Then, later in the evening, he approached me again.
“Yesterday was one of the greatest days in my life,” he said with appar-
ent emotion. “You know, don’t you, that we can now do this thing and
that we’re going to do it. We’re going into Europe. We’ll need your help,
since we’ll have trouble with de Gaulle, but we’re going to do it.”

The Mystique of a Grand Design 215

Disappointing Aftermath

I went home elated, sharing Macmillan’s feeling that yesterday had,
indeed, been a great day and that Britain was getting ready to take an
epic step. But, as I was to discover later, Macmillan’s private conversa-
tions, particularly with regard to such sensitive political issues as Europe,
were often far more forthright and eloquent that his public statements
or official actions. When, on May 1, the Prime Minister wrote the Presi-
dent outlining the British position and suggesting points the President
might usefully make when he met President cle Gaulle, he seemed still
stuck in the old grooves, insisting on special arrangements for British
agriculture and for the EFTA. To help the President draft a proper
reply, I spelled out, in a long memorandum, the basic rationale for our
position. The effect of Macmillan’s highly qualified approach would be,
I pointed out, disastrous to Western cohesion; it would loosen Ger-
many’s ties to the West, as well as encourage General de Gaulle to pursue
his most nationalistic policies. The Prime Minister’s letter demonstrated
the inherent contradiction in the British position. Though ostensibly
agreeing that Britain should join the Common Market, Macmillan wanted
the President to help him evade the political implications of full entry
into the European Community.

By being firm and clear, we could strengthen the hand of those in
London who wished to face the problems squarely, while discouraging
those ministers fighting a rearguard action against anything approach-
ing full British membership. Great Britain unquestionably had special
problems, but so had the other Common Market members when they
first joined; those problems could be dealt with by transitional arrange-
ments within the framework of the Rome Treaty. Such arrangements
might, for example, permit the phasing out of Commonwealth prefer-
ences over several years, while special provisions could be adopted for
British agriculture. Such technical adjustments should, however, be left
for solution after Britain had joined the Community.

All during the summer of 1961, I was oppressed with the thought
that timing was askew; events lacked synchronization. Several times in
my life I was to watch the divergence of trends that might — with better
luck — have come together. The result was frustration — at least at the
time. Adlai Stevenson, for example, might have been elected President
had he run against anyone but a triumphant general. The country might
have been saved the obscenities of a Nixon Presidency had there not
been riots in Grant Park — or, in larger terms, the anti-Vietnam-War
hysteria.

Had Britain embraced the original Schuman Plan proposal, it could
have dominated the evolution not merely of the Coal and Steel Com-
munity but also of the European Economic Community. Reinforced by

216 The Kennedy Years

a dynamic and evolving Economic Community, the Fourth Republic
might have been able to cope with the Algerian crisis without the need
to bring back the First Citizen of Colombey. But Britain, though shed-
ding all but the memories of empire, had not yet recognized the limited
capabilities of an island nation trying to go it alone. The timing was wrong,
and a great opportunity was missed.

Now the timing was still askew, but in a different way. 1 he British
were awakening to the mediocrity of their situation just when the
increasingly confident leaders of France and Germany were resenting
the British for quite different reasons: de Gaulle because Britain had
been on the victors’ side while France had not, and Adenauer, in part at
least, because the British army had locked him up at the conclusion of
the war. With Britain finally in the position where, with encouragement,
it was prepared to join Europe, it might not have the chance.

British Reaction

During the summer, opposition to British entry built up from not
only right-wing Conservatives but left-wing Socialists as well. 1 he politi-
cally canny Macmillan well knew that his decision to join Europe would
be regarded as an about-face — the contradiction of statements and actions
during his five years as Prime Minister and before. Only by a consider-
able tour deforce had he gained the support of his own cabinet. But the
British people were ahead of the politicians; a Gallup Poll taken in June
showed that 46 percent of those questioned favored Britain joining the
Common Market, with only 20 percent against and no less than 34 per-
cent with no opinion. 2 Badly split on the issue, the Labor party was
assuming a neutral stance — its leader, Hugh Gaitskell, waffling. I he farm
organizations were loudly insisting that nothing material be done to alter
British agricultural policy, though there was no way Britain s existing
agricultural policy could be harmonized with the Community’s common
agricultural policy, since the two were based on quite different princi-
ples. Finally, the Commonwealth and the member nations of EFT A were
uttering loud cries of fear and outrage.

All this uproar did not deter two courageous advocates of European
unity from speaking eloquently in favor of British entry. In the House
of Commons, on May 17, Ted Heath made the case with emphasis on
the political implications, while in a speech in Chicago on June 16, Sir
Alec Douglas-Home (later Lord Home), the British Foreign Secretary,
stated the argument in even grander political terms, contending, among
other things, that “a united Europe would finally cement that rapproche-
ment between France and Germany which has been one of the great fea-
tures of the postwar world and acts like a tremendous magnet for that
part of Europe which has been artificially cut off from the mainstream

The Mystique of a Grand Design 21 7

of European development by an alien creed. Interdependence for Brit-
ain must include European interdependence.”

Though the political arguments were more cogent and exciting than
the economic, they were also more subtle and delicate. Did Britain wish
to face a European coalition hostile to its interests, or a group of Euro-
pean nations working closely with the United States that did not include
Britain? To avoid these dangers, Britain must try to become the leader
of Europe. But no British government could publicly admit that it hoped,
by taking leadership of the Community, to regain leverage lost through
the shriveling of empire; that would stir resentment among the conti-
nental powers. Nor did Britain wish to turn its back on those tattered
vestiges oi empire that were the sole remaining residue of the Common-
wealth; the British felt sincere obligations, particularly to members of
the old Commonwealth — or, in other words, the former white domin-
ions.

Finally, the British were proud of the fact that their island kingdom,
with its peculiar set of Anglo-Saxon institutions, differed sharply from
the nations of the Continent. They had different customs, thought in
different terms, and cherished their eccentricities. Any suggestion that
entry into Europe might diminish Britain’s political sovereignty would
have rendered the idea widely unpalatable.

Macmillan s Tactics

So, no matter how much Macmillan privately asserted that entry into
Europe was an act with wide-ranging political consequences, he pre-
sented it to the British people as an economic move dictated by commer-
cial imperatives. Britain could not make the structural adjustments
necessary to maintain an adequate growth rate without what Macmillan
referred to as “the cold douche of competition” in a large mass market.
It needed to join Europe to attract capital from overseas and put its
financial house in such shape as to avoid recurrent sterling crises.

But arguments couched solely in tradesmen’s terms do not lift men’s
hearts or quicken their pulses. A de Gaulle, Churchill, or Roosevelt might
have levelled in the flamboyant gesture, the dramatic announcement
that Britain had decided to join the Community without reservation,
confident that it could work out the necessary adjustments once it were
inside and leading the pack; that was the course of action I urged on my
British friends. But it was not Macmillan’s style: he preferred to play
down the importance of the EEC as though he could casually ease Brit-
ain in without excitement or fanfare or much more than a brief squib in
the Financial Times . “I must remind the House,” he said on July 31, “that
the EEC is an economic community, not a defense alliance or a foreign
policy community, or a cultural community.”

In a memorandum to President Kennedy, I wrote on August 5 that

2 1 8 The Kennedy Years

the Prime Minister was trying to “slide sidewise into the Common Mar-
ket.” By stressing the need to find accommodation for all of Britain’s
interests, particularly those of the Commonwealth and EFT A (the
European Free Trade Association), he had raised problems that would
almost certainly assure a protracted and complex negotiation. The
implications of Britain’s adherence to the Rome Treaty were, I pointed
out, enormous: “If the negotiation preserves and extends the political
content of the Rome Treaty, it will mean substantial additional weight
on the Western side of the world power balance. At the same time, it will
require a major sorting out of political relationships. 1 he economically
advanced non-Communist world will be divided into two principal parts,
the United States and the European Community. Japan will be the only
great industrial power not having [free] access to one of those two great
markets, although other smaller countries will be in the same boat. Its
effects will be profound not only for world politics but for the world.”

I, therefore, recommended that, at his next press conference on
August 10, the President should express gratification at Prime Minister
Macmillan’s announcement and emphasize United States support for the
political and economic integration of Western Europe. We should play
our cards with full awareness that America’s role, though important, was
still peripheral. We had encouraged the Macmillan government to begin
negotiations; now we must watch from the sidelines, making sure, as best
we could, that our own interests were consulted. My task, as I saw it, was
to stand like Horatio at the bridge and forestall any British deal that
would either seriously dilute the political significance of the Community
or discriminate against America.

In holding that line, I inevitably engendered resentment, although,
since my British opposite numbers were professionally polite, I did not,
at the time, know its intensity. The British publisher, Cecil Harmsworth
King, mentions in his diary that in 1966 he and I dined together in
Washington with some British embassy personnel, including Sir Michael
Stewart and John Killick. “When he had left, Killick of the Embassy
chancery and Stewart were saying how much he [Ball] was disliked by
successive British governments: they thought perhaps because he told
them too many home truths!” 3 In his memoirs, Prime Minister Macmil-
lan also attested to my unpopularity. “President Kennedy was . . . help-
ful and sympathetic,” he noted, but “there was always Mr. George Ball
of the State Department who seemed determined to thwart our policy in
Europe and the Common Market negotiations.” 4

The European Free Trade Association

If unpopular in certain British government circles, I was a pariah in
the capitals of the neutral countries of EFTA. I hat resulted not only
from the position I took with their representatives in bilateral meetings,

The Mystique of a Grand Design

219

but also from a public statement in London on April 3, 1962, suggesting
that while the European Economic Community could make some useful
economic arrangements with the neutral members of EFT A — Sweden,
Austria, and Switzerland — it would be wrong to accord free access to the
Common Market to any nation that would not accept the Community’s
political commitments. I had sympathy with the problems Britain faced,
particularly with agriculture and its relations with the Commonwealth.
But EFT A was another matter. The British had brought that problem
on themselves by Macmillan’s foolish attempt to organize a “peripheral
alliance” directed against French and German efforts to build a unified
Western Europe; now they were finding that the shoddy little creature
they had spawned was embarrassing their efforts to face reality.

Ireland, Denmark, and Norway could, if they wished, join the
European Community, accepting the same political commitments as other
members; but Sweden, Switzerland, and Austria claimed that would
compromise their neutrality. They wanted it both ways, demanding the
commercial benefits of the Community without assuming its burdens. In
my view, Sweden and Switzerland defined “neutrality” to suit their own
purposes, and I had no sympathy for such casuistry. The United States
would also be left on the outside of the common external tariff, but we
were not asking for special treatment; if the neutrals opted not to join
Europe, then let them help us negotiate a general liberalization of trade.

Since I expressed myself without ambiguity, I bore the brunt of the
attack. (One of my Swiss friends predicted that I would be burned in
effigy in front of the American embassy in Bern.) There was, I felt, sound
reason for me to accept the obloquy for an unpopular position. I had
assured the British negotiators — including Ted Heath — that America
would run interference for them until we had pushed the neutrals into
a forthcoming position; then, at the right time, I would soften our objec-
tions so they could make some compromise arrangements that would
not damage the Community. It was the kind of tactic the British under-
stood — and, I think, quietly approved.

My impatience with the Swiss and Swedes, who hid behind neutrality
for their own benefit, did not extend to Austria, which was not a free
agent. Austria’s neutrality was required by the 1955 Austrian State Treaty,
through which Austria gained its independence from the Soviet Union.
Now, at the end of August, the Soviet government insisted that, since
the members of the EEC were NATO members, Austria’s membership
would contravene the treaty. I he effect of Austrian participation in the
Common Market would amount, so Pravda argued on December 1, 1961,
to economic and political union with West Germany, which the Treaty
forbade. 5 To its great credit, the Austrian government shrugged all this
of f and applied for “association" with the EEC. The Austrians were, as
I saw it, the victims of Swiss stubbornness; had Switzerland adopted a
less rigorous definition of neutrality, the Austrians could have had more

220 The Kennedy Years

freedom of maneuver, since Austrian neutrality was tacitly defined in
terms of the Swiss position. Though I initially took a firm line with the
Austrians, I always intended, in the end, to help them find a solution.
After a while, they began to understand that we did not wish to damage
their interests, nor would we do so.

The Commonwealth

If the EFT A countries were an impediment to Britain’s entry into
Europe, that obstacle could be overcome by firmness. Britain faced far
more difficulty in satisfying the commercial interests of both the old and
new Commonwealth countries. Though the Australian Prime Minister,
Robert Menzies, and I had tense initial disagreements, I was finally able
to find a solution Australia could live with. I put major effort into that
achievement not only because the problem was important, but because I
had great admiration for Menzies — one of the most effective political
figures of the postwar world. A colorful man of boundless energy and
robust good humor, he delighted me by singing Australian country songs
as we rode about together.

Another member of the old Commonwealth facing even more acute
problems was New Zealand, which, in 1961, had earned 54 percent of
its foreign exchange by selling its bacon, butter, and other products to
the United Kingdom. In the end, even the continental European nations
agreed on the need for special arrangements to solve New Zealand’s
unique problems.

The OECD

If the EEC, with British membership, could evolve the core institu-
tions for European political unity, we would be well on the way toward
our Grand Design. That concept had already caught the imagination of
some fanciful commentators who named it the “dumbbell theory’’ — more,
I liked to think, as a graphic representation of what its proponents
intended than as a derisive comment on their intelligence. A dumbbell
consists of two massive spheres connected by a thin rod. If a unified
Europe were to play a partnership role with the United States, some
institution was required to provide a common forum for the entities on
the two sides of the Atlantic. Though initially any such institution would
concentrate on economic matters, I hoped that it might some day be
supplanted by a body with increasing political interests.

The institution most easily adapted to serve that purpose was the
Organization for European Economic Cooperation (the OEEC), which
had evolved from the temporary committee (the CEEC) established at
the time of the Marshall Plan. Meanwhile, the Eisenhower Administra-
tion had already proposed that it be expanded to include the United
States, giving it the new name of the Organization for Economic Coop-

The Mystique of a Grand Design

221

eration and Development (OECD). I had written a report on this for
President Kennedy in December i960, prior to his inauguration, and we
had talked about trying to dismantle the old organization and beginning
from scratch.

I he OEEC had never achieved the optimistic objectives we had held
for it when I had worked with Robert Marjolin during the drafting of
its charter. Although Marjolin brilliantly led the organization during the
first decade of its existence, British aversion to anything supranational
had prevented its development into much more than an instrument for
consultation — a body that could collect statistics, make studies, and for-
mulate ground rules for cooperation. Now it had lost most of its vitality,
and I was convinced that we could create an effective machine for com-
mon transatlantic decision and action only by beginning afresh. A new
organization generates excitement, attracts first-rate talent, and, with
proper leadership during its early months, can break new ground. But
an institution in business for more than a decade succumbs to a creeping
sclerosis from bureaucratic practices and tired bureaucrats. Excitement
is replaced by routine; there is a drying up of initiative and fresh think-
ing to the point where a Gresham’s law drives out the ablest people.

Unhappily, it was too late to create anything new; in November i960,
the Eisenhower Administration had committed the United States to join
an expanded OEEC. The failure to scrap what existed and make a fresh
start condemned the expanded organization to a pedestrian role, but,
while lamenting the bad timing, I had no option but to support the
enabling legislation; it was finally passed on March 16. After some
scrambling about, we arranged for the President to appoint an excellent
career officer, John Tuthill, as United States representative to the OECD.

Failure of the Grand Design

The Grand Design never became much more than a figure of speech.
Britain s efforts to join the Community were, as I shall recount in a later
chapter, frustrated after long, wearying negotiations by a willful French
leader who resented the United Kingdom’s close ties to America and
feared that Britain would frustrate French hopes to dominate Europe.
By the time the British were finally permitted to enter, a whole decade
later, their economy had already fallen so far behind that of France and
Germany as to preclude them from taking leadership or even playing a
strong constructive hand.

1 oday the fashionable second-guessers dismiss our efforts to pro-
mote a politically unified Europe as mere wishful thinking. We were,
they contend, obtuse not to recognize that political patterns have been
fixed by history and that habits of nationalism are deeply entrenched.
Yet I remain unreconstructed. Britain had emerged from the war with
enormous prestige, while France was still trying to pull together her

222 The Kennedy Years

shattered society and Germany was a beaten and humiliated nation. The
Marshall Plan saved Europe and initiated a period of vaulting prosperity
and increasing self-confidence; wise American leadership brought about
monetary stability and the progressive liberalization of trade. By neu-
tralizing French fears, the Schuman Plan and the European Economic
Community made it possible for the Germans to rebuild their economy,
freeing them from discriminatory restrictions without reviving old fears
and jealousies. Finally the Community brought France and Germany
into effective working relations through participation in a common
enterprise. Had Britain joined the Schuman Plan at the outset, it could
have taken the laboring oar in drafting the Rome Treaty that created
the EEC, and the peoples of Western Europe might today be combining
their energies in a broader framework that could give real meaning to
the concept of an Atlantic partnership.

If I look back with regret at events since the early 1960s, it is not
because I spent so much time and effort trying to advance the building
of Europe, but because the effort failed. Although, God knows, Ameri-
can governments have made plenty of mistakes, our encouragement of
a unified Europe was not one of them. Failure came from no fault of
ours, but because, when key decisions were made, the European leaders
of the moment lacked adequate vision; the puckishness of history pre-
vented events from occurring with the right timing or in the right
sequence. We were pursuing a worthy and — at the time — not a wildly
unrealistic goal. Had our Grand Design been even partially realized, the
world would be a better place today.

17 . Troubles m the Congo

As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has pointed out, John F. Kennedy
was the first American President to show much interest in African affairs.
As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s African Sub-
committee, he had, as early as 1959, called attention to the new explosive
forces in Africa with which America and the West must reckon: “Call it
nationalism, call it anticolonialism, call it what you will. Africa is going
through a revolution. . . . The word is out — and spreading like wildfire
in nearly a thousand languages and dialects — that it is no longer neces-
sary to remain forever poor or forever in bondage.” 1 During the i960
campaign, he had strongly attacked the Eisenhower Administration;
America had, he said, “lost ground in Africa because we have neglected
and ignored the needs and aspirations of the African people.” 2

During the 1950s and 1960s, the new countries were still led largely

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22^ The Kennedy Years

by their emancipators for whom anticolonialism remained the obsessive
driving force long after they had won the battle. Their talents lay more
in revolutionary agitation than in the sober management of poor fledg-
ling nations. It was as though Sam Adams rather than George Washing-
ton had become America’s first President. Following the Suez debacle, a
swollen freshet of new nations shifted the UN center of gravity from
experienced to immature governments and the single-minded zeal of
those new leaders distorted United Nations proceedings. By i960, the
largest organized group in the United Nations was the Afro-Asian bloc,
and its members reacted by conditioned reflex to almost every issue with
anticolonialist rhetoric expressed in an indiscriminate condemnation of
the Western powers. Since colonialism, in their experience, involved racial
discrimination, they ignored the repressive colonialism manifest in the
Soviet Union’s Eastern European empire and failed to recognize the
USSR as the largest of all “colonialist” powers. Thus many were seduced
into serving Moscow’s interests.

In this environment, John F. Kennedy found his African theories
tested earlier than he would have preferred when his new Administra-
tion faced the imminent explosion of the Congo. Lightning could not
have struck in any spot more dangerous or difficult for firefighters. The
Congo presented all the evils and dangers of premature independence
for a sprawling territory strategically important to both the West and the
Soviets.

Introduction to the Congo

I had been first introduced to the Congo’s problems in the late 1950s,
when one of my European law partners brought a minister of the Bel-
gian government to my house in Washington. The minister knew that,
as an adviser to the French Patronat, I had shown interest in France’s
colonial problems in North Africa. He wished to persuade me that the
Belgians could succeed where the French were failing. By its enlight-
ened economic policies, Belgium could maintain control of its Congo
territories without fear of the turbulence bedeviling the French in the
Maghreb. During a long afternoon, he displayed an impressive portfolio
of charts, pictures, and plans to demonstrate how Belgium was improv-
ing the physical environment and elevating the living standard of the
Congolese. He exuded smug confidence that Belgium was in the Congo
to stay. The benign attention of the government in Brussels was, he said,
fully appreciated by the Congo indigenes.

Obviously a man of good will, he amazed me by his insensitivity to
the realities of the colonial predicament, cherishing a fallacy endemic
among former colonial powers that Third World peoples would be tran-
quilly grateful for the paternalistic improvement of their physical lot. In

Troubles in the Congo 225

return for economic aid they would placidly continue to accept rule by
foreigners and the racial discrimination that went with it. (Years later I
could not help but recall the minister’s attitude when, on a brief visit to
Soweto, one of my American companions exclaimed with indignant
incredulity, “What are those African blacks complaining about? I’ve seen
far worse slums in Harlem!”)

In spite of the minister’s self-assurance, I remained unpersuaded.
Belgium, I told him, would have no better luck than other countries in
trying to buck the tide of history. The domination of colonies by a
European metropole could not, I declaimed — perhaps too pompously —
long withstand the rising force of Third World nationalism.

The End of the Belgian Congo

Even so, I certainly did not expect the speed with which Belgium’s
colonial hold would be broken. The abrupt dying fall in Belgium’s colo-
nial music was heard right after August 23, 1958, when General de
Gaulle, on a visit to Brazzaville in the French Congo (just across the river
from Leopoldville), announced that France would grant complete inde-
pendence to any French dependency that desired it. No doubt the Gen-
eral knew that this startling offer would resound through the Belgian
territories to the south, but he took mischievous delight in making prob-
lems for his neighbors (as he amply demonstrated nine years later when
he shouted “Quebec libre” to a cheering crowd in Montreal). His Braz-
zaville statement inspired immediate demands by Congo nationalist
leaders that the Belgian government make a similar offer; attending the
Brussels Exhibition in the same year, they found further stimulus for
their impatience when they met Belgians who showed sympathy for
independence.

The Belgian authorities still felt no sense of urgency until riots broke
out in Leopoldville in January 1959, and Brussels was caught completely
off guard. Almost overnight, the gears of official policy shifted with a
resounding clash as the Belgian King Baudouin on January 13 announced
his government’s intention ‘‘to lead the Congolese population forward
to independence” and outlined a plan for increasing self-government
that promised independence in four or five years.

As so often happens in a revolutionary period, this limited conces-
sion inflated expectations and increased pressures for more rapid and
drastic action. King Baudouin’s promise of leisurely change heightened
the turmoil. Many Belgians in the Congo began to send their families
home. In a panic, the Belgian government called a round-table confer-
ence in Brussels. Though its representatives had come prepared to offer
a shorter transition period, they were met by demands for immediate
independence. Faced by tribal rampages in Leopoldville and other parts

226 The Kennedy Years

of the Congo, the government suddenly caved in; on June 30, i960, the
Congo’s independence was formally celebrated. It seemed symbolic that,
during the ceremony, a spectator stole King Baudouin’s sword.

Belgium’s colonial policy had failed not because it had overexposed
young Congolese to the ideas of the Enlightenment, quite the contrary.
There had been no university at all in the Congo until 1954, nor had
there been provision for educating ambitious Africans at Belgian uni-
versities. Belgium’s leaders, unlike their British counterparts, had done
little to prepare th eevolues for independence.

To their surprise and sorrow, the Belgians discovered overnight that
rather than restraining the Congolese from demanding too much too
soon, Belgium’s failure to prepare them for independence engendered
chaos that induced a panicked exodus of Europeans followed by repres-
sive rule. Nor had the paucity of education prevented black leaders from
emerging. Denied the normal avenues of political action, they had
organized revolutionary activities through tribal structures supple-
mented by associations of “old boy” mission school graduates. Of the
leaders who were to play a major role, five in particular deserve special
comment.

The New Congo Leaders

Joseph Kasavubu was a member of the large and powerful Bakongo
tribe. In 1955, he became president of a cultural-political association
developed for political action in defiance of Belgian authorities. With
that institutional backing, he was elected a district mayor of Leopoldville.

As politics shifted toward a national setting, Patrice Lumumba emerged
as his principal opponent. A member of the small Batelela tribe in the
Orientale Province, of which Stanleyville was the capital, Lumumba had
clawed his way up through the trade-union movement to become the
first truly national politician.

Joseph-Desire Mobutu (now known as Mobutu Sese Seko), at first a sub-
sidiary figure, began his career in 1949 as a clerk in the Belgian Congo-
lese Army. He rose through the ranks of Lumumba’s political party.
Shrewd, ruthless, and corrupt, he showed little of the popular appeal of
his mentor but cunningly exploited his increasing military stature to force
his way to the top. American business interests found him acceptable
because he favored foreign investment and was anti-Communist.

A protege of Lumumba’s from Stanleyville, Antoine Gizenga, fright-
ened Americans most. Lacking the political skills of Lumumba, he gained
power through close ties with the Soviet Union.

The personality whom many Westerners found the most interesting
and attractive was Moise Tshombe. A member of the Lunda tribe in the
Congo’s southernmost province and son of a wealthy family, he drew

Troubles in the Congo 227

support both from his tribal group and from Belgian copper interests.
A cynical and ambitious politician with considerable charm and a sense
of humor, he was a bold and skillful operator.

The African palaver — a kind of talk marathon — is a unique form of
diplomacy and it was only after frenetic talking and maneuvering that a
government was finally formed on June 23, i960, with Lumumba as
Prime Minister and Kasavubu as President. By then the country was
already in trouble; Congolese troops had deposed their Belgian officers
and embarked on sadistic riots — looting Belgian houses and raping-
European women — outrages that precipitated a mass exodus of white
residents. Now history imitated art; though Lumumba had almost cer-
tainly never read Evelyn Waugh’s classic satire, Black Mischief , he tried to
appease his army by precisely the same tactics employed by Waugh’s
hero, King Seth: he promoted every man to the next higher rank, thus
leaving the army without a single private soldier. To protect the lives
and property of its remaining 90,000 citizens, the Belgian government
sent in paratroopers in July i960, which aggravated the mounting
resentments.

The United Nations in the Congo

Lumumba appealed first to the United Nations and then to the Soviets
to end the Belgian “aggression.” The UN Security Council — under pres-
sure from the Afro- Asian bloc — adopted a hasty resolution on July 13,
i960, calling on Belgium to withdraw its troops from the Congo and
authorizing the Secretary-General “to take all necessary steps in consul-
tation with the Congolese government to provide it with such military
assistance as may be necessary.” Dag Hammarskjold, the last strong,
independent-minded Secretary-General the United Nations is ever likely
to have, responded by approving the creation of a UN force to replace
the Belgian troops, thus undercutting the Soviets’ excuse for inserting
forces of its own. Hammarskjold then held his ground against a diplo-
matic counter-offensive.

As the fragility of the new government became increasingly appar-
ent, tribal groups in several parts of its vast territories proclaimed their
independence. In the eastern province, Antoine Gizenga announced the
formation of a government at Stanleyville that claimed sovereignty over
the whole of the country. In the southern territory of Katanga, contain-
ing rich copper and diamond mines that provided half the Congo’s for-
eign exchange and tax revenues, Moise Tshombe announced the creation
of an independent state. Lumumba responded by asking the Soviet Union
to help put down the Katanga rebellion.

Supported by Russian and Czech “technicians” and Soviet military
equipment, Lumumba’s army tried to push into Katanga but was repulsed

228 The Kennedy Years

by Tshombe’s forces, which included Belgian volunteers and hired
adventurers. The victory of Tshombe’s mercenaries critically weakened
Lumumba’s prestige and authority.

On August 3, 1960, Hammarskjbld announced that United Nations
troops would enter Katanga on August 8, but cancelled the order when
Tshombe refused entry. The news that the upstart Tshombe had defied
the United Nations created a sensation. The Soviet Union proposed to
send troops if the Belgians were not withdrawn and the Congo’s terri-
torial integrity safeguarded. The Secretary-General now decided to visit
Katanga to talk with Tshombe. Though no one can say with assurance
just what passed during their private interview, Hammarskjold presum-
ably reassured Tshombe that the United Nations would not assist the
Congolese government to subdue Katanga. On that understanding,
Tshombe agreed to permit the entry of the UN force. 3

With Lumumba humiliated by his military fiasco, Kasavubu dis-
missed him as Prime Minister. That led to a protracted tug of war between
Kasavubu and the new parliament, resolved only when Colonel Mobutu,
then commander of the Force Publique, took temporary control of the
country. He promptly expelled the diplomatic representatives of the
Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, leaving the Communists to try to
regroup in Stanleyville.

The Situation Confronting Kennedy

That then was the tangled Congo mess when President Kennedy was
inaugurated. A United Nations force had been sent to the Congo on a
limited mission to keep the peace, pending the withdrawal of Belgian
forces and the building of an adequate army under the national govern-
ment’s command. Kasavubu was holding Lumumba in prison; Tshombe
was persisting in his secessionist drive in the Congo; Gizenga claimed to
head a Congo government in Stanleyville. To complicate matters, Kasa-
vubu turned Lumumba over to Tshombe, and, on February 13, 1961 —
only about three weeks after Kennedy came to power — the Katangese
authorities confirmed the killing of Lumumba under highly ambiguous
circumstances, thus making him an instant martyr in radical Third World
circles.

That was rich fuel for the Soviets’ anti-UN campaign, and they moved
rapidly to capitalize on it. Though they had encouraged the original
commitment of a UN force to the Congo as a means of getting the Bel-
gians out and giving them a free hand, it no longer served their pur-
poses. They launched a campaign to try to destroy the United Nations
as an effective institution, demanding that Secretary-General Hammar-
skjbld be dismissed as “an accomplice and organizer” of the murders,
calling for the arrest of Tshombe and Mobutu, and insisting on support

Troubles in the Congo 229

for the “legitimate” Katanga government of Acting Prime Minister
Antoine Gizenga.

We saw all this as a major headache, but if America were to have an
African policy at all, we could not ignore the Congo. It was, as I later
described it, “a keystone of central Africa.” Superimposed on a map of
Europe, the Congo would extend from the Atlantic to the Soviet fron-
tier. From Elizabethville to Leopoldville was as far as from Bucharest to
London; as one writer has put it, “between the inhabitants of Katanga
and those of the Bas-Congo, there is about as much resemblance as
between a Rumanian peasant and a cockney.” 4 With two hundred tribes
speaking a score of dialects, the Congo was unmanageable by a central-
ized government.

Even more important than its size and diversity was its strategic
position. As I wrote in 1961, “It has a long frontier with each of the
three major areas in which we divide the African continent south of the
Sahara Desert: West Africa, already independent and divided into a
number of states of varying sizes; East Africa, now rapidly evolving from
British tutelage into what we hope will be a stable and prosperous inde-
pendence; and the southern part of the continent, beset with critical
problems that are now beginning to emerge in sharp relief on the world
scene.” 5

On February 25, 1961, as one of his first acts, President Kennedy
warned that America would “defend the Charter of the United Nations
by opposing any attempt by any government to intervene unilaterally in
the Congo.” 6 To keep the UN force in place, the United States then
made up the financial shortfall resulting from a refusal of the Commu-
nist countries to bear their share of the cost.

Death of Hammarskjold

On September 13, Hammarskjold took off for North Rhodesia to
meet again with Tshombe and arrange a cease-fire. He was killed on
September 18, when his plane crashed before landing at Ndola.

By an odd quirk of circumstance, I seemed always to hear of porten-
tous events at international meetings. I was at a Bilderberg meeting in
Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1955 when President Eisenhower had his first
heart attack. At a Fiuggi (Italy) Bilderberg meeting in 1957 , 1 first learned
of the Soviet’s Sputnik. Finally, on September 18, 1961, at the annual
meeting of the International Bank and Monetary Fund in Vienna, a
shocked conference hall heard the announcement of Hammarskjold’s
accident.

Until Hammarskjold died, I had been far too occupied with other
matters to pay much attention to the Congo, but now I took overall charge
of the State Department’s direction of our Congo policy. In a sense, it

230 The Kennedy Years

was no policy at all; it had evolved in response to events, and I could
discern no clear, central strategy. Even within the Department there was
a confusion of voices; each bureau seemed determined to advance its
particular bias. That was normal. Indeed, it was as it should be; to achieve
perspective and a three-dimensional strategy, a subject had to be viewed
from more than one point of vantage. But the system could work effec-
tively only if someone with overall responsibility — either the Secretary
or his deputy (then known as the Under Secretary) — was prepared to
distill from these disparate attitudes and opinions a policy expressing the
nation’s larger interests and to assure that that policy was faithfully exe-
cuted.

Disparate Opinions

With its strong — and understandable — anticolonial bias, the African
Bureau tended to reflect the views of the African bloc; it saw secession
as the effort of Belgian interests to preserve their entrenched positions,
using Tshombe as their instrument. As my own responsibilities were not
geographically limited, I tried to fit our policies toward the Congo into
a context larger than African politics. I could not wholly agree with
Chester Bowles or “Soapy” Williams. Bowles, who had written a book
about Africa, felt deeply about its peoples and, like Williams, was moved
by an idealism that, in my more cynical view, expected too much of the
new African leaders.

Understandably, the African Bureau’s views were heavily influenced
by the opinions of our ambassador to the Congo, Edmund Gullion. A
strong and effective career officer, Gullion had come to share the view
of the United Nations representatives in the Congo that the Katanga
secession must at all costs be repressed. Thus, we were constantly receiv-
ing what I thought of as “Tshombe delenda est ” messages from our Leo-
poldville embassy.

The Bureau of International Organization Affairs, headed by Har-
lan Cleveland, had a different point of reference — the anxiety to assure
that the United Nations demonstrate its authority and effectiveness. While
not unsympathetic with the African Bureau and definitely anti-Tshombe,
Cleveland and his colleagues cautioned restraint, fearing that the UN
forces might become bogged down and UN authority undercut by a pro-
tracted (and necessarily bloody) attempt to end the Katanga secession,
which was outside their mandate. They were necessarily sensitive to the
views of Adlai Stevenson, who was then our UN ambassador, and, because
the primary role of the Bureau of International Organization Affairs
was to serve as the conduit between the Department and our New York
mission to the United Nations, they constantly found themselves in the
middle. It was not always easy to interpret the views of the mission to

Troubles in the Congo 231

the Department and the views of the Department and the White House
to the mission. Adlai spent his days and nights in the United Nations
environment and could not ignore the vehement anti-Tshombe demands
of the Afro-Asian bloc. He also had to maintain harmonious relations
with the Secretary-General and Secretariat; the cooperation of both was
essential.

Finally, the European Bureau was, by definition, concerned with the
reactions of major European governments. The French government,
having abstained from voting to commit UN forces to the Congo, now
refused to pay its share of the expenses. The British government, under
Prime Minister Macmillan, sympathized with Tshombe. It had its own
colonial interests to consider; the southern boundary of Katanga bisected
both the Lunda tribe and the copper belt, which extended into what was
then the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Key members of the
British government saw an independent Katanga as a buffer against the
more radical elements in Leopoldville. Furthermore, some of the more
cynical of us suspected, rightly or wrongly, that certain members of
the British government might have a financial interest in Tanganyika
Concessions, which owned 30.78 percent of Katanga’s Union Miniere.

Shaping a US Strategy

My first order of business was to develop a clearly articulated United
States strategy. It was not on our initiative that the United Nations had
sent troops to the Congo; the United States had merely supported a
move by the Afro-Asian bloc. The Eisenhower Administration’s failure
to define and explain a clear American policy — a failure we had not yet
rectified — now made President Kennedy vulnerable to conflicting pres-
sures. I he Belgians had left the Congo in a frightf ul mess, and I was
never convinced that an inexperienced government in Leopoldville could
make its writ effective throughout a huge, sprawling tribal conglomerate
one-third as large as the United States. Leopoldville’s tenuous authority
extended through a primitive system of roads and communications to
diverse peoples and areas with little in common. Some argued from these
facts that we should try to salvage Katanga as the one area that might —
with continuing help from Belgian interests — sustain itself and evolve as
an effective small nation-state. In spite of all the hatred of Tshombe as
a tool of colonialism, he had — in contrast to the demagogues in Leopold-
ville — demonstrated some capacity for leadership.

But logic is irrelevant in Africa, where national boundaries are merely
lines marking the fortuitous collision of expansionist colonial powers.
They bisect tribes and language areas, ignore topographical facts such
as rivers or mountain ranges, and are even more irrational than gerry-
mandered electoral districts in America. I hat built-in fragility was, in

232 The Kennedy Years

fact, the main argument for keeping the Congo together. If any of the
new African nations were to be broken into its logical parts, the resulting
chain reaction of fragmentation would turn Africa into an unmanagea-
ble sandheap of small, poverty-striken tribal entities. Moreover, were we
to offer even the most qualified support to an independent Katanga, we
would, in the eyes of the Third World, identify ourselves with the Bel-
gian colonialists; that would give the Soviet Union a golden opportunity
to exploit the resulting disaffection of those areas of the Congo that had,
in losing Katanga, lost also their major source of revenue.

As a lawyer who regarded the adversary process as the most effective
engine to elicit the truth, I put hard questions to my colleagues who
espoused divergent lines of policy. What was the United Nations really
trying to do? Was it trying to protect its own forces? Was it trying to
destroy Tshombe’s army, which was largely manned by white officers,
mercenaries, and volunteers? Was it primarily seeking to end the Katanga
secession? If so, was that consistent with the objectives for which it had
originally entered the country? The British, I knew, were contending
that such an intervention in Congolese internal quarrels had been
explicitly barred by one of the earlier Security Council resolutions
adopted in December i960. 7

I had no doubt that the UN forces were clearly exceeding the man-
date provided by the Security Council — or even perhaps by the Charter
itself. But I still had to balance that item against America’s Realpolitik
interest in supporting that makeshift fighting force. We had, I thought,
a compelling reason to prevent a secession that would tear the Congo in
two. Gizenga, Lumumba’s ideological heir, was based in Stanleyville; the
Tshombe regime was established in Elisabethville; Kasavubu presided in
Leopoldville. If the Soviets obtained a base in the heart of Africa, we
would have to drive them out. The United Nations military force seemed
the best hope of avoiding such a dangerous confrontation. If it could
not bring the great powers together, it might at least keep them apart in
a highly strategic area. Moreover, we could not exclude past history from
the equation; two American administrations had gone along with UN
activities in the Congo, and the costs of reversing our course would be
high.

Speech on the Congo

A policy not carefully articulated is, in my view, no policy at all.
Whenever I encountered a difficult question as to where American
interests lay, I hammered out a formulation as free as possible of diplo-
matic obfuscation; it was, I suppose, a lesson learned from Jean Mon-
net — one could best test and order his thoughts by writing them down.
So I set forth our Congo position in a speech on December 19, 1961, at

Troubles in the Congo 233

Los Angeles. Later, with the approval of President Kennedy, who liked
the speech and suggested a few additions, we had it published as a pam-
phlet and widely circulated as the definitive statement of our Congo pol-
icy. 8 In that speech, I pointed out that the “Congo’s main political issue,
perhaps the only real ‘modern’ issue, was Congolese unity,’’ and that, “if
the Congolese government should prove unable to deal effectively with
the Katanga secession of Mr. Tshombe, militant extremists, such as the
Communist-chosen instrument Mr. Gizenga, would bid to take over the
central government in the name of Congolese unity. In the resulting civil
war, our main objectives in Central Africa would be drowned in blood.”
I posed the alternative: “Why shouldn’t Katanga be independent? For
that matter, why shouldn’t every other tribe in Central Africa that wishes
to declare its independence have the right to do so? ... to those who
approach the problem from the viewpoint of protecting a particular
interest, something may perhaps be said for carving enclaves out of the
Congo, though I am convinced that even this calculation is mistaken. But
if one looks at the problem from the viewpoint of saving all of central
Africa from chaos and Communist infiltration, then clearly the accept-
ance of armed secession by a tribal area, no matter how rich and well-
supported, can lead only to disaster.” There was, I contended, “simply
... no legal case, no political case, no economic case, and no moral case
for Balkanizing the heart of Africa.”

Peace could be restored only through negotiation. With Katangese
authorities engaged in a steady buildup of men, munitions, and equip-
ment (including airplanes) obtained through the devious international
arms trade, there would, I predicted, be an inevitable clash with the UN
forces. That clash finally occurred at Elisabethville. On December 3,
Ralph Bunche (who was the Acting Secretary-General following Ham-
marskjold’s death and before the election of U Thant) had directed the
UN force to reestablish law and order and, in the face of threats of an
impending Katangese attack, had authorized it to take any action nec-
essary to restore the rights of the United Nations in Elisabethville. Heavy
local fighting erupted on December 5, increasing in scale during the
following days. Then gradually the UN force gained control of the situ-
ation, using US Globemaster aircraft to airlift UN troops.

If we were to counter the threat from the Communist-dominated
Stanleyville in the eastern Congo, we had to arrange a deal between con-
trolling factions at the two other points of the triangle: the Leopoldville
leaders in the north and Tshombe’s Elisabethville faction in the south.
Tshombe must be persuaded to halt the secession and bring Katanga
into some kind of Congo federation, and the Kasavubu regime must
abandon its insistence on a centralized government.

Unfortunately, American opinion did not fully support such a course,
and — as we were to learn bitterly in Vietnam — no American foreign pol-

234 The Kennedy Years

icy can succeed without the support of both Congress and the public.
Tshombe not only had the strong financial backing of Belgian financial
interests but was rapidly becoming a folk hero of the American right.
He was, claimed his apologists, a determined anti-Communist trying to
save the richest area of the Congo from the encroachments of leftist
forces in Leopoldville. Southern Senators, in particular, favored him,
because his secessionist ambitions evoked atavistic memories of the old
South. They also saw him as being harassed by an Afro-Asian bloc that
expressed its residual anticolonialist sentiments in a vindictive effort to
destroy the only leader really interested in the country’s welfare. Several
vocal and influential Protestant ministers also championed his cause.
Tshombe was their man; in contrast to Kasavubu and Lumumba, both
products of Catholic mission schools, Tshombe had been trained by
Methodist missionaries.

Tshombe mounted a noisy public relations campaign financed by
Belgian financial interests under the direction of a man named Michel
Struelens. The Katangan lobby’s principal instrument was the American
Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters, founded in 1961 under
at least the nominal chairmanship of Max Yergan, a black educator. On
December 14 of that year, it published a full-page advertisement in the
New York Times and seventeen other major newspapers under the head-
line: “Katanga is the Hungary of 1961,” demanding the withdrawal of
financial aid to the UN mission in Katanga. That appeal brought more
than three thousand contributions from commercial and industrial com-
panies. Further support for the campaign came from conservative or
isolationist organizations, such as the John Birch Society. In March 1962,
the Katanga Freedom Fighters Committee organized a meeting in Mad-
ison Square Garden where $80,000 was collected for the pro-Katanga
struggle. 9 Richard Nixon complained in a syndicated article in the New
York Herald Tribune on December 19, 1961, that our Congo policy had
failed and that the Kennedy Administration was leading us toward a
Communist takeover of the Congo — a remarkable charge from one who
had been Vice-President in an Administration responsible for the initial
commitment of UN troops to the Congo. Tshombe, said Nixon, was “a
dedicated anti-Communist.” Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut
went even farther, accusing United Nations troops of “naked aggres-
sion” and “atrocities” against Katanga and demanding a Senate investi-
gation — a statement endorsed on December 30 by former President
Herbert Hoover.

It was formidable conservative frog-croaking, especially when Sena-
tor Richard B. Russell of Georgia recorded his disapproval in a letter to
President Kennedy. That lent solidity to the opposition, for Senator Rus-
sell was not one of the usual suspects in the front ranks of partisan con-
servatives. He commanded respect from a young President who only a

George Ball, c. 1920

George Ball as an undergraduate at Northwestern University, 1929.

Ruth Murdoch in 1929. She married George Ball in 1932.

George Ball, a director of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, in front of the Ritz,
Paris, 1944. Note the breach of military decorum in an unbuttoned overcoat.

Ruth Murdoch Ball, 1944.

ON THE OPPOSITE PAGE

John Colin Ball, the George Balls’ hrst child (above),
and Douglas Bleakly Ball, their second, in 1947.

Bernard De Voto. Writer, frontiersman, and historian

ON THE OPPOSITE PAGE

Above: George Ball and his fellow director of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey,
John Kenneth Galbraith {left), viewing the bust of Hitler at Bad Nauheim in May
1 945 -

Below: With Wilson Wyatt, campaign manager for Adlai Stevenson in 1952.

Adlai Stevenson in 1952 inscribed the photo: “With apologies to a dear friend
and political widow, Ruth Ball.”

DUBOIS, THE DRAKE

☆ OCTOBER 19 62 *

SUN

MON

TUE

WED

THU

FRI

SAT

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

1 1

12

13

14

15

16

17

13

19

20

21

22

1

23

2C

ns

26

27

28

29

30

31

1

Sterling silver plaque showing the dates of the Cuban Missile Crisis — a gift from
President Kennedy.

Cartoon appearing in Canard Enchaine during argument over British entry to the
Common Market, 1963.

For George Ball — with highest esteem and best personal regards, John
Kennedy.”

Averell Harriman sworn in as Assistant Secretary of State, 1963.

I

With Portugal’s Premier Antonia
de Oliveira Salazar, September
1963.

With Chancellor Ludwig Erhard
of West Germany, 1964.

Under Secretary of State Ball at Checkpoint Charlie overlooking East Berlin,
November 1964.

With President Lyndon Baines Johnson and former Secretary of State Dean
Acheson, 1964.

With Archbishop Makarios III, Cyprus, 1964.

McGeorge Bundy, George Ball, Dean Rusk, and President Johnson, April 1964.

A reception at Buckingham Palace during May 1965 SEATO meetings.

<o o-^> b aJfcte/t; fcoJ2£^

Ou*s f*'*'' 0 "^ "rt+^b u>o <ifc ? 66 >J-^ 4 ^ A-CXfc» f

&<-«L-«^ 1^*-*^ *

Inscription reads: “To my friend and alter ego George Ball as proof that we look
at things alike! Dean Rusk.” July 1965.

Aboard Air Force One with Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson, NATO trip, 1965.

Meeting at the White House with (left to right) Robert McNamara, McGeorge
Bundy, Hubert Humphrey, and President Lyndon Johnson.

With Dean Rusk and President Johnson, July 21, 1965.

With Ruth Ball and Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, January 1966.

Audience with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shahanshah of Iran, at the time of the
coronation, Teheran, October 1967.

Presiding at Family of Man Award dinner honoring Jean Monnet {at lectern).
Left to right: George Ball, The Hon. John J. McCloy, and Norman Vincent Peale,
1967.

Robert F. Kennedy and Jean Monnet at Family of Man Award dinner, 1967.

With King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, 1968.

Sworn in by Chief Justice Earl Warren as Permanent Representative to the
United Nations, April 1968. Ruth Ball and President Johnson witness.

Cartoon appearing in the Christian Science Monitor following resignation from the
UN to assist Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign. September 1968.

t.i/rt .■ * yr*' //. t /*<* / / /

7/;k^ u*t*. (f^h*

f£&* M"*J /7 . 7-7 r

ON THE OPPOSITE PAGE

Above: with Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, 1970.

Below: with Albert Speer during interview at Duke of Holstein’s castle known as
Schloss Gliicksberg, March 1971.

Family Portrait. Left to right, rear: Douglas Bleakly Ball, John’s wife Linda
Ottenant Ball, John Colin Ball. Seated: Ruth Ball and George Ball. October
1 9 ^ 1 •

2^6 The Kennedy Years

year earlier had been a junior Senator and never a member of the inner
club. So Kennedy sent Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs
George W. McGhee to explain the situation quietly to him. McGhee, a
highly personable Texan, was well-liked by southern Democrats in the
Congress, and he could never be dismissed as an anti-Tshombe fanatic.
Meanwhile, we concentrated on trying to set up a meeting between
Tshombe and Premier Adoula (now head of the Leopoldville govern-
ment) that might produce not only a cease-fire but also a settlement.

Since so many forces were pushing in different directions, caution
was required. In December 1961, U Thant and the commander of the
UN forces, intent on pushing into Katanga, rejected any idea of a cease-
fire until settlement conversations had actually begun between Tshombe
and Adoula. Adlai Stevenson and our UN mission in New York, neces-
sarily sensitive to the Secretary-General’s views and the prevailing UN
sentiment, urged that the UN forces be permitted to push forward. Our
concern in Washington was that a UN effort initiated to prevent great-
power intervention had, under pressure from the more radical African
countries, been transformed into an anti-Tshombe crusade; we wished
to avoid any appearance of supporting such a crusade.

Given this basic divergence, I found myself conducting a running
argument with Stevenson, who had little patience with a White House
and State Department he thought insufficiently sensitive to Third World
sentiments. Moreover, being outside the range of fire from leading
members of the Senate and the House, he did not feel the domestic heat
as we did.

With the UN forces poised to drive into Elisabethville, we were eager
to get Tshombe to come forward with some specific proposals. The Pres-
ident was determined that the United States not press for any UN action
that might appear to be aimed at Tshombe’s destruction; before the mil-
itary action got out of hand, we must, therefore, make it clear to U Thant
that we would support the United Nations only for limited military
objectives and not for a general offensive. Stevenson was equally firm
that the UN forces should continue the fight, even after they took Elis-
abethville, until Tshombe was prepared to talk. Thus I was caught in a
searing predicament between the President’s instructions, which I had
helped to shape and fully supported, and deference to the convictions
of an old friend whom I loved and admired and who — more than any-
one else — was responsible for my role in the government.

Meanwhile, we were asking the French and other Europeans to help
push Tshombe into line, and, perhaps in response to French pressure,
President Kennedy, on December 14, 1961, received the following appeal
from Tshombe: “For ten days, troops of the United Nations have been
putting pressure against Katanga, causing the loss of human lives and
material damage. Force alone will never be able to resolve the Congolese

Troubles in the Congo 257

problem. I confirm my desire to negotiate with Monsieur Adoula the
various aspects of this problem. I ask your intervention as a free man
and as a Christian to designate a suitable negotiator to stop at once this
useless infusion [sic] of blood.”

What reply should the President give to Tshombe’s cri de coeur ? U
1 hant, Stevenson told me, would insist that the President flatly reject
Tshombe’s proposal; we would be interfering with a UN operation if we
designated a negotiator or mediator. But in Washington we were con-
vinced that Tshombe would never negotiate with a UN mediator. As a
compromise, we proposed that U Thant request the President of the
United States to undertake mediation through any agent he might
appoint. We did not intend to let a possible settlement break down over
a silly jurisdictional quarrel as to whether the United States or the United
Nations should designate the negotiator.

U I hant proposed to advise Tshombe that he was designating Dep-
uty Secretary-General Ralph J. Bunche and Robert A. K. Gardiner to
mediate and that a plane would be sent for Tshombe. No mention was
made of a cease-fire. I was convinced that if U Thant spoke for us,
Tshombe would never negotiate, since, as Tshombe saw it, the United
Nations forces in the Congo were trying to kill him.

That disagreement over tactics led to the most heated argument I
ever had with Stevenson, and it was painful for both of us. I felt he was
being unrealistic, while he, no doubt, thought I had sold out to the
nationalistic types in Washington. The United States should, he argued,
not try to preempt what was clearly a United Nations role. If we chose
to go ahead, U Thant would simply refer the matter back to the Con-
golese delegation and then to the Security Council, which would destroy
any possibility of negotiation.

We settled the long haggle by simply advising the United Nations
that the President was designating Ambassador Edmund A. Gullion as
his representative to facilitate a meeting between Adoula and Tshombe
and was so notifying Tshombe. Though we omitted an explicit assurance
of a cease-fire, we authorized the United States consul in Elisabeth ville,
Lewis Hoffacker, to say, when he delivered the message, that a ceasefire
would be in effect. In Kitona in the southwestern Congo, Ambassador
Gullion and UN Deputy Secretary-General Bunche looked over their
shoulders as I shombe and Adoula engaged in an African pow-wow that
lasted seventeen hours. An agreement was finally reached and signed on
December 21, 19b 1 - Tshombe explicitly acknowledged the authority of
the central government and undertook to comply with various UN res-
olutions requiring him to get rid of his mercenaries and stop behaving
independently.

On its face the agreement seemed to have settled all the difficult
issues, but we remained skeptical. Based on past experience, we doubted

2^8 The Kennedy Years

that Tshombe would live up to its terms, particularly after he had told the
press in Kitona that they had been unsatisfactory and would have to be
presented for approval to his Parliament, which might take a week or
two.

On December 22, I telephoned McGeorge Bundy in Bermuda (where
the President was meeting with Prime Minister Macmillan) to report that
the Tshombe cabinet had broken up after a three-hour session the night
before and that Katangese representatives had released a communique
denouncing the agreement as not binding since Tshombe had no advance
mandate from the provincial parliament. With the cooperation of Brus-
sels, we were working on an economic program to cut off Tshombe’s
sources of financing. To my mind, only the prospect of financial strin-
gency would persuade Tshombe to live up to his commitments.

By this time, U Thant, under pressure from Adoula and anxious to
dispose of the Katanga problem so he could begin reducing the UN
force, was strongly urging a speedy settlement. In July, a new plan was
drafted, largely in the State Department, for graduated economic and
financial pressures on Katanga. Meanwhile, the situation was, Stevenson
and 1 agreed, rapidly deteriorating. The French were dragging their
feet, and, though Belgian Foreign Minister Paul Henri Spaak was doing
his best, the Union Miniere was actively working to sabotage the effort.

In the United States, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the approach of
Congressional elections deterred us from any new Congo initiatives,
though a mission by George McGhee strengthened hope that concilia-
tory measures could succeed. We were increasingly anxious that they
succeed soon, for the Adoula government seemed to be falling apart,
which would create new openings for Soviet infiltration. A serious ques-
tion had also arisen as to how long the UN force could be held together;
India, after the Chinese attack over the Himalayan mountain barriers,
was threatening to withdraw its contingent.

Sanctions were a sticky problem. A new plan drafted by George
McGhee in November 1962 proposed a milder formula for the division
of revenues and thus proved helpful in winning Spaak’s support for
economic pressures. Great Britain still held back, as did the Union
Miniere. On December 27, after Katangese gendarmes opened fire on
UN forces, the UN troops began a counter-operation that put them in
full control of Elisabethville by December 29. A second contingent
occupied Kamina, and a third the rail and mining center of Jadotville.
The UN Command on the spot then decided to act on its own and expand
the fighting without regard to any instructions from New York, where
U Thant had announced on December 29, 1962, that military action by
the UN forces had already ended. Denying that the Katanga secession
had been ended by force, he repeated on December 31 that the military
situation was stabilized, even though fighting was actually continuing. 9

The General and His Thunderbolts 259

This, then, was the first stage of our involvement in the Congo, but
it was not to be my last embroilment with that beleaguered and unhappy
land, where, as I shall describe later, affairs took one bizarre twist after
another.

18 . The General and His Thunderbolts

Charles de Gaulle’s obsessive ambition was to make France
top dog in world councils; that was possible, he believed, only if he were
top dog in France. His misfortune was to be constantly at war with his-
tory, for he had the bad luck to come too late on the scene. France was
no longer, as in the eighteenth century, the richest and most populous
nation in the Western world; she was not even self-sufficient in defense
but dependent on America’s military presence and on the American-
dominated NATO. That, to de Gaulle, was intolerable, and he tried by
the levitation of his own will to raise France to an equal rank in super-
power councils.

Proposal for Directorate

He had disclosed that intention on December 27, 1958, when he pro-
posed to President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan
that the three nations constitute a directorate. They should establish tri-
partite machinery for global strategy outside of NATO, carve the world
into areas of assigned responsibility, make joint decisions, and develop
common military strategies that would include plans for nuclear warfare
even though the French bomb was still eighteen months in the future.
In Washington, the proposal created more surprise than it deserved, as
it had long been obvious that Paris was out of phase with American
thinking. Nonetheless, early in July 1959, Secretary Dulles made a spe-
cial trip to sort out problems with the General. De Gaulle insisted that,
unless France were properly represented in the world’s top councils, his
country would quickly deteriorate. Dulles replied that a world role for
France could come about only concomitant with its development of
internal strength, and that formalizing such a role would engender jeal-
ousy in Italy and Germany. Though groupings for directing the free
world might exist in fact, they would be resented if explicitly acknowl-
edged.

With his directorate scheme rebuffed, de Gaulle shifted tactics. Con-
ceding that there was no need for a permanent strategic understanding
{entente), he argued that NATO should be extended to cover the Middle

260 The Kennedy Years

East and at least all of Af rica north of the Sahara and that the structure
of the alliance should be revised. Apart from France, the United King-
dom, and the United States, Germany was the only other country that
“need realistically” be considered, but Germany could not yet speak on
an equal basis with the other three powers. In an effort to placate
de Gaulle, Dulles invited French participation in tripartite military con-
sultations. The French asked for a study of strategy in the Far East —
particularly with respect to Laos. But the American military took the
position that, since neither British nor French forces could contribute
much to Far East defense, there was no point in joint command relation-
ships.

That marked the end of de Gaulle’s initial efforts to raise France to
superpower status. Thereafter, he tried in a half-hearted way to gain
control of Europe on French terms. About a fortnight after Kennedy
had assumed office, the six European Economic Community (EEC)
countries — meeting in Paris — set up a commission headed by the French
ambassador to Germany, Christian Fouchet, to develop proposals for a
political union — a “union des etats” with no supranational aspects. After
several versions and revisions, the scheme foundered in April 1962, when
the Dutch and Belgians refused to go forward so long as Britain was not
a member of the Common Market.

This is background for four events occurring on different levels dur-
ing the latter months of 1962 that were finally to interact in a dramatic
fashion.

Converging Activities

First, the British-EEC negotiations were proceeding at a snail’s pace,
with the parties still far apart. Heath, with the brilliant assistance of my
old friend from wartime days, Eric Roll (now Lord Roll), was bargaining
hard, withholding for tactical reasons offers of compromise on certain
key issues, which he could, at the eleventh hour, concede in concluding
a final settlement.

Second, de Gaulle was pursuing a new option in his quest for the
leadership of Europe — an entente with Adenauer, in which France would
be the predominant power.

Third, America’s nuclear partnership with Britain was facing a crisis,
as Britain neared the end of a generation of delivery vehicles.

Fourth, to forestall the resentment that might develop from Ger-
many’s continued exclusion from the nuclear club the United States was
proposing the creation of a mixed-manned fleet of nuclear vessels to be
operated on a collective basis by the United States and other European
nations, including Germany. Such a proposal had been foreshadowed in
March i960, when the NATO commander, General Lauris Norstad,

The General and His Thunderbolts 261

suggested that US, British, and French battalions be assigned to a
supranational force under NATO command. Later, in November, he
suggested a “multilateral atomic authority” within NATO that would give
alliance members “an essentially equal voice” in controlling the nuclear
components of NATO systems. At the December i960 NATO ministe-
rial meeting, Secretary of State Christian Herter put forward a two-part
proposal. Five United States Polaris submarines would be assigned to
NATO and a sea-based, mixed-manned Polaris force, multilaterally
owned, financed, and controlled, would be established. One hundred
missiles would be committed to the latter force on terms that would
prevent their withdrawal from NATO.

When the Kennedy Administration took office, the problem was
immediately reviewed and in a speech at Ottawa on May 17, 1961, Pres-
ident Kennedy announced that, “to make clear our own intentions and
commitments to the defense of Western Europe, the United States will
commit to the NATO command five — and subsequently still more —
Polaris atomic missile submarines. . . . Beyond this, we look to the possi-
bility of eventually establishing a NATO seaborne force, which would be
truly multilateral in ownership and control, if this should be desired and
found feasible by our Allies, once NATO’s non-nuclear goals have been
achieved.” 1 During succeeding months, several members of the alliance
expressed interest in studying the creation of a NATO multilateral sea-
borne missile force, and, in October 1962, we sent a United States team
headed by Gerard Smith and Admiral John M. Lee to Europe to present
technical information.

Though I was, of course, generally aware of the proposals for a mul-
tilateral force, I did not at first take them seriously. But as the French
increasingly flaunted their force de frappe as a badge of great power sta-
tus, I began to fear that the Germans might, over time, develop a sense
of grievance. At the same time, for the Federal Republic to acquire a
nuclear capability of its own would create great tensions with a Soviet
Union that still exploited German revanchism for its own purposes and
would be totally unacceptable to other Western European powers. As I
said in a speech on January 1 1, 1965,

It is not enough to say that there is no desire in Germany to become a nuclear
power. Not only is this proposition dubious, but it is largely irrelevant. In
approaching the problem of nuclear management, we must concern ourselves
not merely with the situation of today, but also with that of tomorrow. . . .

We cannot safely proceed on the assumption that the Germans will be pre-
pared over the years ahead to refrain from efforts to obtain some nuclear capa-
bility. We cannot count upon German willingness to resign themselves to a second-
class status, nor upon our ability to compel Germany to do so.

When the Western European Union was created, Germany gave a very lim-
ited commitment not to manufacture nuclear weapons on her own soil. But Ger-

262 The Kennedy Years

mans are as familiar as the rest of us with rebus sic stantibus and in 1964 — when
that commitment was given — France had not yet made the decision to become
an atomic power. . . . 2

Germany rearmed after World War I in the face of clear commit-
ments that it would not do so because the Allied nations lacked the sus-
tained will to enforce those commitments. That failure of will, I said,
arose in large part from the feeling, rightly or wrongly, “that the doc-
trine of original sin had no place in international arrangements and that
discrimination against Germany should not be perpetuated.”

There were, I contended, two lessons that the last fifty years should
have clearly taught us about Germany. “First, the Germans should not
be left alone to develop a feeling of isolation from other people of the
Free World; second, they should not be left with a real or imagined sense
of grievance or discrimination. Such feelings can be dangerous in any
country. They can be particularly dangerous in the case of Germany.”

That was the reasoning which led me to support the proposed crea-
tion of a collective military force. A land-based force was excluded because
it would have to be deployed within the national territory of a member
state; a sea-based force could spend its life in international waters. The
nuclear weapons system on the mixed-manned ships or submarines would
be under the collective control of a group or committee representing the
participating nations. The weapons could be bred only by unanimous
decision of that group, acting under instructions from their govern-
ments.

Such a scheme was obviously more complicated than nuclear man-
agement by a single state, and in practical effect a mixed-manned force
would have little military value. But that was not the point; I saw it as
serving a political objective. I thought we might offer such a force to our
allies — not seek to impose it; only if they showed sufficient interest would
we invite them to work with us in transforming the concept into a reality.

The Failure of Sky holt

Besides enabling West Germany to share the management of a
nuclear weapons system I hoped that the multilateral force might pro-
vide the British an excuse for relinquishing their own national deterrent.
Britain had a special claim to be a nuclear power since she had closely
collaborated in developing the nuclear bomb. But with her postwar trou-
bles, she had not been able to keep pace in the development of delivery
systems, and in the early 1960s manned aircraft capable only of drop-
ping bombs over targets were no longer adequate. As a result, after
abandoning an initial effort to develop a missile of their own, the British
had agreed to join with the United States in developing a new air-to-

The General and His Thunderbolts 263

surface missile called Skybolt. Mounted beneath the wings of B-52
bombers and the British V bombers, it could be launched at ground
targets one thousand miles away. At American insistence, the agreement
provided that either party could terminate the arrangement after con-
sultation with its partner. Nevertheless — albeit the point was not made
explicit — the British regarded the agreement as an American commit-
ment to underwrite Britain’s nuclear future.

By the spring of 1962, Secretary McNamara had decided that Sky-
bolt was an excessively expensive project with serious technical flaws,
and that the progress achieved with the Polaris and Minuteman missiles
made it redundant. But cancellation would have to be carefully worked
out with the British. I knew the Pentagon was unhappy with Skybolt, but
I spent little time thinking about it. Both the President and Secretary
Rusk considered it as primarily a military matter to be handled by McNa-
mara; it had, they assumed, only incidental political overtones.

Since all of us were, at the moment, weary from the Cuban missile
ordeal and preoccupied with sweeping up the debris, none of us regarded
a forthcoming meeting between Macmillan and Kennedy at Nassau as
more than a routine affair — merely the sixth in a series. Skybolt had not
originally been on the agenda, and the Defense Ministers had not planned
to attend until McNamara telephoned me on December 7 that he had
decided to go. That meant, as I told him, that the British Defense Min-
ister Peter Thorneycroft would also insist on attending, which would
make Skybolt the principal subject of discussion. Rusk opted to stay home,
since he had earlier scheduled our annual diplomatic dinner for that
night and did not want to offend the diplomatic corps. I was a last min-
ute recruit.

The Nassau Conference

Secretary McNamara telephoned the British Minister of Defense on
December 8 to advise him that the final decision to cancel the Skybolt
had not yet been taken, though it obviously outraged his own concepts
of cost-effectiveness. Whether or not that call was intended to satisfy the
prior consultation’ clause I do not know. The decision to scrap Skybolt
had, in fact, already been effectively made, but officially McNamara and
Rusk took the position that there had been no final decision.

Since the matter obviously had to be discussed with the British in
advance of Nassau, McNamara decided to visit Thorneycroft. Roswell
Gilpatric, McNamara’s able Deputy, called me on Saturday, December
8, to discuss the position McNamara should take with the press when he
arrived in London. According to Gilpatric, he planned to say that Sky-
bolt was being carefully reappraised because of its marginal character in
terms of time and cost and because all such programs came up for review

264 The Kennedy Years

at budget time; the purpose of coming to London was to consult the
British. But on the evening of December 10 Secretary McNamara sent
me a draft press statement he proposed to make on arriving in London
which made clear that the Skybolt had failed its flight tests. I immedi-
ately telephoned McNamara to urge that he eliminate any reference to
the flight tests. He had to make clear he was coming to consult and not
to cancel. He would, moreover, violate protocol were he to say anything
substantive to the press prior to meeting with the government. I o sug-
gest that the Skybolt test had failed — implying that we would cancel the
missile — would needlessly embarrass Thorneycroft.

But the advice was not taken and when McNamara arrived at Gatwick
Airport, his press statement made clear that all five tests of the Skybolt
missile had failed. That aroused British anger. Only six days earlier Dean
Acheson had made his famous comment at West Point that Great Britain
had lost an empire but not yet found a role, and the more chauvinist
leader writers had responded explosively — no doubt because that com-
ment struck too close to home. Now they played variations on the theme,
implicitly assuming that Acheson’s statement reflected the considered
view of the Kennedy Administration.

McNamara’s insistence on announcing the failure of Skybolt illus-
trated both the strength and weakness of his temperament. Once he had
made up his mind something should be done, he would damn the tor-
pedoes and full steam ahead, in spite of any incidental breakage caused
by inappropriate timing. The doctrine of cost-effectiveness required that
Skybolt be dropped, and he was not prepared to keep it temporarily
alive merely for political reasons.

McNamara’s meeting with Thorneycroft was a foregone disaster.
Thorneycroft accused the Administration of wishing to deprive Britain
of its national nuclear deterrent; the British press and government
insisted that the United States was tactless, heavy-handed, and abrupt.
We were, they implied, either grossly insensitive to the pride and secu-
rity of an ally or wished to push Britain out of the nuclear club. Some
charged that Skybolt had not failed but that the United States was threat-
ening cancellation to force the British to fulfill their troop quota in West-
ern Europe.

Maneuvering Prior to Nassau

Shortly after McNamara’s talk with Thorneycroft, Prime Minister
Macmillan met President de Gaulle at Rambouillet. Just what transpired
is not altogether clear. Some of my British government friends feared
afterwards that Macmillan had spent too much time alone with de Gaulle,
and we all knew the hazards when two heads of government get together
without the benefit of chaperones to record their conversation. Perhaps,

The General and His Thunderbolts 265

they surmised, the Prime Minister overestimated his own comprehen-
sion of the shadings and nuances of the French language. He apparently
gave de Gaulle a full account of the Skybolt project and told him that he
planned to protect the continuity of British nuclear power” by persuad-
ing the Americans to provide a satisfactory alternative; if one were not
forthcoming, Britain would build its own delivery system. He indicated
to de Gaulle that he would ask the Americans for Polaris submarines.
Though the submarines might nominally operate within NATO, he
would insist that Britain keep control of the weapon in time of crisis.

He did not, of course, know any more than we did about conversa-
tions then under way between the French and Germans. As early as the
end of September, de Gaulle had given Chancellor Adenauer a draft
proposal for a Franco-German entente. On November 12, after pro-
longed debate inside the German cabinet, a memorandum had been
sent to Paris that accepted de Gaulle’s proposals in principle but insisted
that Franco-German military cooperation must be developed within the
framework of NATO and in agreement with it. These matters were all
discussed when French Foreign Minister Couve de Murville and Ger-
man Foreign Minister Gerhard Schroeder, met on December 16 and 17,
immediately following Macmillan’s visit to Rambouillet.

All this was in progress when we met the British at Nassau from
December 18 to 21 in what was probably one of the worst prepared
summit meetings in modern times. Hasty preparations for the Nassau
Conference forced me, for the first time, to take a careful look at the
Multilateral Force (MLF), to which I had not, up to then, paid much
attention. With the failure of Skybolt, we faced the question whether,
and by what means, we should extend the life of Britain’s deterrent into
a new weapons generation. Without providing some collective control of
the new delivery system, such a reassertion of the nuclear special rela-
tionship would almost certainly upset the French — a point eloquently
urged on me by Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Wil-
liam Tyler, a member of our Nassau delegation. Bonn might also react
badly since the action emphasized Germany’s exclusion from the nuclear
club.

The issue of the conference was largely settled even before we arrived.
Soon after the plane took off from Washington, the British ambassador,
Sir David Ormsby-Gore (now Lord Harlech), a close friend of Kennedy’s
for many years, talked with the President in his private cabin, where the
President had changed into pajamas for an hour or more of rest. As I
reconstructed the conversation later, largely from what the President
told me, Kennedy had been taken by surprise at Ormsby-Gore’s dour
appraisal of the situation. The Macmillan government, so the ambas-
sador stated, was in a precarious position. Macmillan had made much of
the special relationship and his ability to use it for Britain’s benefit; if

266 The Kennedy Years

he now went home empty-handed, America might have to deal with a
more neutralist and less pro-American Labor government under Hugh
Gaitskell.

The Nassau Meeting

When the plane landed, Prime Minister Macmillan was waiting at the
Nassau airport to greet the President, and, during the usual airport cer-
emonies, the local police band struck up an old English song “Early One
Morning.” Remembering it from my childhood with my English-born
father, I suggested to one of my colleagues that the British had carefully
chosen the piece for the occasion. The words, as I recall them, were:

Oh, don’t deceive me.

Don’t ever leave me,

How could you use
A poor maiden so?

Nassau was a pleasant meeting site. The President lived on the side
of a hill adjacent to the Lyford Cay Club, in a handsome house that
belonged to Canadian industrialist Ed Taylor, whom I had casually known
in my Lend-Lease days; Prime Minister Macmillan occupied another
house farther up the hill. The rest of us were housed in the club. But
the British had not come to enjoy the golf or to let us enjoy it; their mood
seemed not merely subdued but grim. Macmillan met privately with the
President that night and told him of the political problems we were caus-
ing him by proposing to cancel Skybolt. The British people had come to
believe in the special relationship; they had placed all of their nuclear
hopes on Skybolt. What was his government to do now?

Next morning the meeting began somberly. I thought Thorneycroft,
in particular, suspicious and resentful almost to the point of hostility.
Macmillan beat the drum heavily for the special relationship and urged
us to provide Polaris as a substitute for Skybolt. He dismissed any thought
that it might prejudice the United Kingdom’s pending application for
membership in the European Community; Britain s disagreements with
the Community were, he said, over agriculture, not nuclear policy. When
he talked with de Gaulle at Rambouillet, the General had fully under-
stood Britain’s nuclear predicament.

But how could we provide Britain with a new nuclear weapon not
committed to a multilateral force or even to NATO, without creating
problems, not only with France but potentially with Germany ? Should
we not seek some kind of multilateral solution? Kennedy asked me to
speak to the question. 1 recited the arguments developed by the group
working on the Multilateral Force, but Macmillan would have none of it.
Britain was going to remain a full-fledged nuclear nation; he had no

The General and His Thunderbolts 267

interest in participating in any multilateral experiments. He was in fine
form, eloquent but self-contained, forceful but sad. His government, he
said, was in a shaky position; he had to bring back something concrete,
which could only be Polaris without strings. Otherwise, our “special
relationship” would be irreparably damaged.

At one point, when I stressed the need that any Polaris offer be linked
to a nuclear fleet manned by crews of mixed nationalities, Macmillan
said to me disdainfully, “You don’t expect our chaps to share their grog
with I urks, do you?” Remembering a fact I had learned from my his-
torian son, I replied, “Wasn’t that exactly what they did on Nelson’s flag-
ship?” I was pleased with that glib answer but made no converts, even
when I pointed out the dangers of the course Macmillan was advocating.
We had turned down France’s request for aid in connection with an
enriched uranium plant in March 1962 and had rejected General Nor-
stad s scheme for a land-based MRBM force for NATO; now other
European nations — particularly France — would regard an unqualified
Polaris deal as offensive in emphasizing America’s preferential treat-
ment of Britain. At that point, the President came to my support,
expressing concern at the growing number of nuclear nations. For each
nation to develop its own separate deterrent made it almost impossible
for the West to have a coherent strategy.

I understood the President’s dilemma. He was fond of Macmillan
(their friendship went back many years) and he was always sensitive to
the distress cries of a fellow politician. He certainly preferred a Macmil-
lan Conservative government to a Gaitskell Labor government that might
reverse the British decision to enter Europe and pursue a neutralist
course. Moreover, our nuclear arrangements with Britain were unques-
tionably reciprocal; Britain had agreed to make Holy Loch available for
our Polaris submarines and had let us establish our missile warning sta-
tion at Fylingdale.

During the entire session, I found Macmillan both shrewd and
impressive: shrewd in the way he played on the President’s sympathy,
and impressive when he suddenly spoke about the need for a United
Europe. I described the scene later as follows:

During the First World War,” he told us, “most of my comrades and my
closest school friends were killed. I saw my Guards battalion destroyed at Loos
in 1915 and on the Somme a year later.” He and his older brother, Daniel Mac-
millan, were invalided out of the war” with severe wounds in five engagements.
He had known the desolation of the battlefield and the futility of war. He was
haunted by the slaughter of 1914-1918 and did not believe the world could
stand a continuation of the vicious national rivalries of Europe. He said all this
to us at Nassau, and was to repeat much of it in the first volume of his memoirs
published three years later. Writing of his war experience (Winds of Change, p.
98), he said,

268 The Kennedy Years

“I brooded over these dire events . . . few of the survivors of my own age felt
able to shake off the memory of these years. We were haunted by them. We
almost began to feel a sense of guilt for not having shared the fate of our friends
and comrades. We certainly felt an obligation to make some decent use of the
life that had been spared to us.”

His major motivation for trying to lead Britain into Europe, the Prime Min-
ister assured us, was political and not economic. He wanted Britain to participate
in building something better than the self-destructive system of the past. Yet
when the debate began . . . , Macmillan put his case to the country almost entirely
in terms of commercial and economic expediency. British industry, he said,
needed the “cold douche” of competition in a great market, but this was not an
argument to stir men’s hearts or inspire their imagination, and the government
made little effort to educate public opinion on the larger issues . 3

At the conclusion of a strained and uneasy day, McGeorge Bundy
for the Americans and Philip de Zulueta for the British were commis-
sioned to draft a communique. They produced a monument of con-
trived ambiguity, so obscurely drafted that the two sides could construe
it differently. Still, even fuzzy language on the multilateral issue seemed
to me better than nothing, and, after I had offered Bundy a few sugges-
tions, I decided to struggle no longer. Macmillan had achieved what he
had told de Gaulle he would achieve: he had obtained a clause that per-
mitted the British to withdraw their Polaris forces from NATO “when
HMG may decide that supreme national interests are at stake.” That
assured them, in effect, the continuance of their own national deterrent,
making nonsense of most of the other commitments.

Bill Tyler, who was closer to the problem than I, saw more clearly
the destructive implications of emerging events. The agreed arrange-
ments would, he told me, outrage de Gaulle, as they would document
beyond question Britain’s incestuous ties to America. They could well
push de Gaulle toward refusing Britain entry to Europe on the
ground it was an American “Trojan horse.” We must, he insisted, make
at least a gesture toward the General, so President Kennedy and Prime
Minister Macmillan sent separate draft letters to de Gaulle. Kennedy s
letter offered to make Polaris missiles available to France on the same
terms as those offered Britain. Macmillan’s letter stressed the fact that
Britain had preserved its independence under the agreement. With what
I suspect was deliberate whimsy, Prime Minister Macmillan told the pi ess
in London on December 23 that he had never fully understood what the
“special relationship” meant, though he had just proved his mastery at
exploiting it.

The Nassau meeting had been a crushing defeat for the Grand
Design. We made a strictly British-American deal, and the British did
not take seriously its multilateral overlay. Since France had been absent,
our offer to the General would inevitably appear as an afterthought
and the General was not one to wear anyone’s cast off clothing.

The General and His Thunderbolts 269

De Gaulle’s Thunderbolt

Those apprehensions were well founded. Early in January 1963, I
flew to Europe, primarily to talk with Chancellor Adenauer regarding
the Multilateral Force. On Thursday, January 10, I met with the French
Foreign Minister, Maurice Couve de Murville. Since I had known him
for a number of years, I felt we could speak frankly. I was principally
concerned with de Gaulle’s attitude toward Britain’s application to join
the European Community. What would the General say about it at his
forthcoming press conference the following Monday, January 14?

A French friend, Charles Gombault, editor of France Soir , had already
telephoned to say that the General was climbing Mount Elysee with a
bundle of thunderbolts under his arm. He had provided a quick outline
of what the General planned to say at his press conference, including his
final rejection of British entry, and I told Couve what I had heard. If
the French President did take such a position, I said, it could create
serious problems between Paris and Washington. The Foreign Minister
seemed quite unperturbed. “You are,” he said, “far too experienced to
believe what you hear from press circles; you’ve been around too long
for that. I can assure you there are no such ideas in this house.”

That night Edward Heath and I had dinner together in a private
room at the Hotel Plaza Athenee. Heath was in ebullient good spirits,
since he had lunched with Couve de Murville and received what he
thought was an unambiguous assurance that the way for British entry
was still open. Serious obstacles, of course, remained, but Heath seemed
confident the British application was in no serious trouble. Next day I
was not so sure. M. Gombault brought to my hotel a reporter who had
attended a background briefing at the Elysee Palace early in the week,
where a select group of correspondents had been given an advance precis
of President de Gaulle’s press conference. The account he then recited
proved a completely accurate statement of what de Gaulle did in fact say
the following Monday.

Couve de Murville’s unqualified assurance has haunted me ever since,
and I have discussed it with Ted Heath, who feels equal mystification.
Could de Gaulle have failed to take his own Foreign Minister into his
confidence? The late Sir Pierson Dixon, who was at that time Britain’s
ambassador to Paris, is reported to have believed that at the time Couve
de Murville knew nothing of President de Gaulle’s decision. 4 I would
like to believe that, but even though the General was famous for his
secrecy, how could his Foreign Minister have been unaware of a matter
on which the press had already been briefed?

On Sunday, I flew to Bonn and the following morning met with
Chancellor Adenauer to discuss the MLF and our other bilateral
German-American problems. The Chancellor was in a mischievous mood.
He greeted me with a sad face, “I couldn’t sleep last night. I dreamed all

2 jo The Kennedy Years

night that this morning Mr. Ball and I were going to have a fierce fight
because I would not like anything he proposed. Now, tell me what you
have to say, Mr. Secretary.”

I held forth on the merits of the multilateral nuclear force and how
it would enable the Federal Republic to play a nuclear role without evok-
ing cries of alarm from the rest of Europe or even the Soviet Union. At
the conclusion of the morning he said (as he had planned to say all along),
“You’ve set all my doubts to rest, Mr. Ball. I am quite in accord with
what you’ve told me. This afternoon my government will announce its
full support for your proposals.” We had what the Chancellor described
as a “celebratory lunch,” and as we talked, I discovered the depth of
Adenauer’s anti-British feelings. With a scorn verging on bitterness he
said, “You don’t seriously think Macmillan is ready for Europe, do you?
You can’t really think that the British can catch that bus?”

Late that afternoon, Monday, January 14, we learned the details of
de Gaulle’s dramatically stage-managed press conference. The General
had concentrated his fire on Britain’s entry into the Common Market,
on the Nassau agreements, and on Franco-German cooperation. 1 here
were, he stated, three objections to British entry: (1) Britain’s economic
background differed from that of the Six, and it was clear that she lacked
the determination to change it; (2) The present six member nations
showed more resemblances than differences; (3) Britain’s entry would
be followed by other EFTA members, and that would change the char-
acter of the Community completely.

He then turned to the Nassau agreements. Because the Soviet Union’s
long-range ballistic missiles now threatened America, the United States
had only a secondary interest in European defense. Our handling of the
Cuban Missile Crisis had shown that the Americans would use nuclear
weapons to defend themselves without any consultation with their
European allies, even though those allies would have received the main
thrust of any Soviet retaliation. America’s nuclear force was still the
guarantor of world peace, but it did not respond to all the needs of
Europe and France; thus France had developed her own nuclear forces.
The Nassau agreements had given Britain Polaris missiles and American
know-how to construct the submarines to launch them. France, on the
other hand, had neither submarines nor nuclear warheads, and thus
could not use the Polaris missiles offered to her. I he French deterrent
must always be under French control.

The most enthusiastic passages in the General’s dissertation con-
cerned Franco-German cooperation. Two great peoples that had for so
long fought one another had now achieved a new spirit of sympathy and
understanding: as though two cousins had discovered one another, each
seeing the other as useful and attractive. For the first time in many gen-
erations the French and Germans felt solidarity. And he extolled in
rhapsodic terms the potential of a Franco-German rapprochement.

The General and His Thunderbolts

27/

If the General had expected this to be well received in Bonn, he was
manifestly mistaken. That night at dinner at the American embassy, I
found German ministers quite as upset as I. The theatrical elegance with
which de Gaulle dismissed the British angered Americans and greatly
offended other European governments. The General was asserting a
French primacy — unsupported either by military force, industrial
achievement, or population — that flatly contradicted the concept of
equality among the Six. He was suggesting a degree of agricultural pro-
tectionism contrary to the spirit of the Community, and was gratuitously
insulting the Brussels Commission. It was vintage de Gaulle.

The Franco-German Treaty

On January 29, just over a fortnight after de Gaulle’s press confer-
ence, Couve de Murville fulfilled his appointed role as chief executioner,
thus effectively ending any immediate British hope for accession to the
Rome Treaty. Even before then, Adenauer had journeyed to Paris to
sign a Franco-German I reaty. That Treaty provided for meetings at
least twice a year between the heads of state of the two governments and
at least three times a year between the ministers of foreign affairs. High
officials of the two foreign affairs ministries would meet at least once a
month; the ministers of national defense at least every three months;
and the chiefs of staff at least every other month.

The two governments would consult each other before making
decisions on any important external matter in an ef fort to concert a com-
mon position on problems of the European Community, political and
economic relations with Communist East, all matters debated in inter-
national organizations (such as NATO and the United Nations), and aid
to underdeveloped countries. The two governments also agreed to
develop common strategic and tactical military doctrines, with their armed
forces cooperating and their armaments industries working in close con-
sultation. I he Treaty had no time limit and no provision for unilateral
renunciation.

Washington Reaction

I can hardly overestimate the shock produced in Washington by this
action or the speculation that followed, particularly in the intelligence
community. There were wild rumors of a plan to pave the way for France,
with Bonn’s assistance, to negotiate with Moscow for a whole new Euro-
pean arrangement. We compared and supplemented our intelligence
reports with bits and pieces gathered by the British. We looked at all
possibilities of a Paris- Bonn deal with Moscow, leading toward a Soviet
withdrawal from East Germany to be followed by some form of confed-
eration between the two parts of that severed country. That would, of
course, mean the end of NATO and the neutralization of Germany.

272 The Kennedy Years

In the early days of February, we asked the German government
pointed questions as to its interpretation of the treaty in the light of
France’s rejection of United Kingdom entry into the Common Market,
and the anti-American overtones of the General’s press conference. Was
it true that Germany no longer welcomed the United States’ views and
presence? Was it not a tragic mistake, just when the Communist world
was in disarray following the Cuban Missile Crisis, for the Western nations
to reverse the drive toward greater unity? How, finally, could the fuzzy
military clauses of the Treaty be reconciled with relations and responsi-
bilities in NATO, particularly in view of de Gaulle’s known antipathy to
NATO and his desire to play a smaller role? Finally, we emphasized that,
once Western Europe and the United States began to make separate
demands on, and conflicting approaches to, the Soviet Union, Nikita
Khrushchev would play one off against the other. That would mean the
disintegration of our common security.

A Comforting Preamble

We soon found that many German government ministers and offi-
cials were as alarmed as we by the implications of the new Franco-German
relationship. They were angry and embarrassed by Adenauer’s trip to
Paris to sign a document that threatened German-American relations.
While Adenauer was away on a holiday at his home in Cadenabbia on
Lake Como, the caucus chairman of the Bundestag, Heinrich von Bren-
t ano — already resentful because Adenauer had removed him as Foreign
Minister — worked with Foreign Minister Schroeder to draft a preamble
to the Treaty that was finally adopted on May 16. That preamble noted
specifically that the rights and obligations of the Federal Republic
resulting from multilateral treaties to which it was a party would not be
modified by the new Treaty. It expressed the “resolute wish” that the
Treaty be so implemented as to achieve the principal objectives that had
guided the Federal Republic in cooperation with its allies and which
determined its policies. It mentioned in particular: the maintenance and
strengthening of the North Atlantic alliance and particularly the close
association between Europe and the United States, the right of self-
determination for the German people and the restoration of German
unity, common defense within the framework of the alliance, and the
integration of armed forces of the member states, the unification of
Europe according to the pattern set up by the existing European Com-
munities, and the lowering of tariffs in negotiation carried out within
the framework of GATT. The Federal Republic government also sent
Dr. Karl Carstens, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, to Wash-
ington to calm the waters, and I had long talks with him during his visit.
I liked him and regretted that, in view of the anxieties of the moment,

The General and His Thunderbolts 273

we had to give him a hard time. Carstens, a German lawyer, who is now
the President of the Federal Republic, is a sympathetic man with a lucid
understanding and unquestioning commitment to Western values.

As the form and content of the preamble emerged, the clouds of
conspiracy enveloping the Treaty began to dissipate. What we had
thought was the coming together of two governments had been merely
the final act in a love affair between two old men — de Gaulle and
Adenauer — in which de Gaulle was clearly the dominant partner.
Adenauer had long dreamed of a Franco-German rapprochement , seeing
it essential to European peace. Beyond that he had a profound mistrust
of the British. Though this mistrust has been usually attributed to the
treatment by the British military when he was Burgomaster of Cologne
during the British occupation, I suspect it resulted quite as much from
Britain’s weakness and its temptation to concessions during the Berlin
crisis in 1958 and 1959. In addition, support costs for forces in Germany
were a thorny issue not only between Britain and Germany but also the
United States and Germany. Finally — and no doubt the conclusive point —
de Gaulle had cast a powerful spell on the old man, shrewdly playing on
Adenauer’s vanity and weaknesses.

The preamble effectively repudiated all that de Gaulle was seeking
to accomplish through the Treaty. Submitted first to the German Fed-
eral Council (the upper chamber), it was adopted by twenty-nine votes.
Realistic as he could be on occasion, de Gaulle realized that his maneuver
had failed. On July 2, 1963, at a dinner for French parliamentarians he
remarked in reference to the Treaty, “You see, treaties are like young
girls and roses; they do not last long. If the Franco-German Treaty is
not to be implemented, it will not be the first case in history.’’ On July
23 of the following year, he, in effect, told the Germans that if they
continued to cling to their Atlantic concepts and failed to align their
foreign policy with his, he would undertake his own explorations with
Moscow, which indeed he sought to do.

Thereafter, in conducting France’s affairs he paid no attention to the
I reaty’s commitments. In 1964 he recognized the Communist govern-
ment of China and in 1966 decided to withdraw from NATO without
bothering to consult Bonn, while, on its part, the Federal Republic
adhered to the Treaty of Moscow and the suspension of nuclear tests
even though France refused to do so. 5

For Adenauer, the rebuff implied in the passage of the preamble was
the beginning of the end. In March and April of 1963, there were rumors
of an attempt by an SPD-FDP coalition to replace Adenauer with Ludwig
Erhard, who strongly favored British entry. The pressure plainly build-
ing up for the retirement of the eighty-seven-year-old Chancellor finally
succeeded when he tendered his resignation on October 15 and Erhard
took over.

274 The Kennedy Years

An Obit for the MLF

Though I have sometimes been spoken of as the principal advocate
of the Multilateral Force, I never felt fervently about it, seeing it solely
as a political instrument and fully recognizing that it was a clumsy if not
unworkable military concept. In retrospect, I no doubt overestimated
the effect on the German people of permanent exclusion from the man-
agement of nuclear weapons. Particularly after the emergence oi'Ostpol-
itik, in the early 1970s, Bonn became heavily preoccupied with developing
operational arangements with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that
would permit the return of Germans from Poland and alleviate the
hardships of divided families on the two sides of the Iron Curtain. Any
suggestion that West Germany might become even a modest participant
in controlling a nuclear weapon would have created insurmountable
problems with Moscow — and the Germans had a clear sense of priorities.

In the end, the MLF failed for want of enthusiastic European sup-
port. Even the possibility of a Multilateral Force was ruled out by the
final draft of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Long before that,
however, the idea had passed into the limbo of aborted projects. Although
Bob McNamara and I had continued for a time to support it, President
Johnson became increasingly cool toward the idea, and it was finally
dropped. I had no deep regret at its passing.

Looking back from the vantage point of 1981,1 can derive one lesson
from the futile episode of the Multilateral Force. In designing policy to
meet particular political or military requirements, we are sometimes
tempted to conceive solutions in the spirit of that whimsical cartoonist,
Rube Goldberg. Certainly that was true of the MLF, which, on its face,
was a manifestly absurd contrivance. At the moment of writing, the same
point can also be made regarding the MX — the proposal to scar the
American desert with a bizarre set of tunnels through which nuclear
weapons would constantly be moved. The lesson, as I see it, is this: once
a project assumes the attributes of the grotesque it will never succeed.
The American people still possess a sufficient residue of common sense
to recognize the ridiculous when they see it.

19. A yub Khan and Salazar

Ever since the Italian city-states first established permanent
embassies in the sixteenth century, relations between governments have
been effectively conducted through what are banally known as normal
diplomatic channels.” Although today the jet plane has tended to

Ayub Khan and Salazar 275

encourage special diplomatic missions, they should be used sparingly —
only when relations with foreign governments have, for one reason or
another, become particularly sensitive and complicated. That was the
situation in the early fall of 1963, when President Kennedy asked me to
hold in-depth conversations with the Prime Minister of Portugal and the
President of Pakistan.

Background of Discontent

As a NATO member, Portugal s chief contribution to Europe’s
defense was the Azores air base. But those arrangements were uneasy,
since we were not getting on at all well with Prime Minister Antonio
Salazar, Portugal’s undisputed ruler. Salazar not only resented our pub-
lic piessure on his country to offer independence to its two principal
African possessions — Angola and Mozambique — he also believed we were
actively helping insurgent movements in those areas. Holden Roberto,
who headed an African liberation movement known as the National Front
for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), had established a government in
exile in Zaire and controlled much of the northeast of Angola with the
exception of Cabinda. Our African Bureau, I knew, maintained sympa-
thetic contact with him but I was assured that the only assistance we were
providing was limited to educational activities in the rebel camps. The
Salazar government strongly suspected that our assistance went much
fuither, and there was concern that, if we could not clarify our position,
the Azores bases might no longer be available.

Our relations with Pakistan were equally sour. In 1955, when the
British with the encouragement of Secretary Dulles were putting together
the bits and pieces of the so-called “northern tier” barrier reef, Pakistan
had joined in the creation of the Baghdad Pact (which subsequently
became known as CENTO); it later joined SEATO as well. As envisaged
by the Pakistanis, their alliance commitments entitled them to preferen-
tial treatment from America. Though there was a qualification in the
CEN T O I reaty limiting America’s defense obligations to resisting Com-
munist aggression, Pakistan saw the alliances primarily as a source of
support in its struggle with India.

Soon after the Kennedy Administration took office, the Pakistan
government detected a change in our policy. Rejecting Dulles’s view that
any countiv not explicitly for us was against us in the East-West conflict,
the new Administration made its peace with nonalignment; America,
according to the new doctrine, would no longer press Third World
countries to choose sides. That drastically devalued the claims to pref-
erential treatment for so-called “allies” such as Pakistan, and some Pak-
istanis felt betrayed. With our most devout economic developers from
Harvard and MIT fascinated with India, they saw their huge neighbor

276 The Kennedy Years

receiving far the largest share of our total foreign aid — in spite of the
fact that Nehru was the noisiest cheerleader for nonalignment.

The Pakistanis obviously found this galling and said so. Still they
might have become reconciled had the Chinese, in September 1962, not
attacked India over the Himalayan mountain barriers. Taking account
of India’s global importance, our outspoken and effective ambassador
in New Delhi, my old friend, Ken Galbraith, persuaded Kennedy that
we should help India restore and strengthen its armed forces. At the
Nassau Conference in December 1962, he obtained approval of a sub-
stantial military assistance package that left the Pakistanis bruised and
surly. In their eyes, the United States was arming a neutral country against
an ally — a sentiment stridently voiced by Pakistan’s anti-American news-
papers.

Faced with these two edgy situations, I arranged to visit both Salazar
and President Ayub Khan.

Visit to Salazar

Salazar had long seemed to me a figure “out of joint with his times
(to borrow a phrase from Portugal’s famous epic poet, Luis de Camoens,
who used it some years before Shakespeare). In the mid- 1920s, after the
Portuguese economy had been wrecked, in large part by a brilliant bank-
note fraud, Dr. Salazar had been drafted from the economics faculty of
the University of Coimbra to rescue the country. 1 Beginning as Finance
Minister, he had become Prime Minister in 1932 under a new constitu-
tion that established Portugal as an authoritarian state. When I went to
see him in 1963, he was very much in command and never hesitant to
use his full powers. But in manner and appearance he seemed more the
professor than the archetypal dictator. Dapper in dress, slightly built,
and pale, he was formally courteous in an Old World way. Consistent
with his style of frugal simplicity, his office was sparsely furnished and
he gave an impression of frailty and shyness quite out of character for a
notorious “strong man.”

In advance of my trip, I had re-read Portugal’s great national epic
poem. Composed in the seventeenth century, The Lusiads told of Portu-
guese conquests with a sense of national pride mingled with Christian
purpose. In introducing The Lusiads, its author, Camoens, proclaimed,
“This is the story of heroes who, leaving their native Portugal behind
them, opened a way to Ceylon, and farther, across the seas no man had
ever sailed before. ... It is the story, too, of a line of kings who kept ever
advancing the boundaries of faith and empire. . . .” 2

The mystique of “advancing the boundaries of faith and empire was
central to Salazar’s convictions. It explained both his conservatism and
his profound confidence in the righteousness of his cause. I quoted

Ayub Khan and Salazar 277

Camoens at an early point in our conversation, and Salazar responded
with a grateful smile. During our talks, history constantly intruded, so
that our whole conversation seemed set against the backdrop of the grand
but pathetic saga of Portugal. Salazar was absorbed by a time dimension
quite different from ours; it seemed as though he and his whole country
were living in more than one century, and the heroes of the past were
still shaping Portuguese policy. That impression was so acute that, after
our second day of conversation, my reporting telegram to President
Kennedy observed, among other things, that we had been wrong to think
of Portugal as under the control of a dictator. It was, instead, “ruled by
a triumvirate consisting of Vasco da Gama, Prince Henry the Navigator,
and Salazar. I also telegraphed Galbraith in New Dehli, advising, “Hav-
ing j ust spent two days with Salazar, I now know what it means to give
serious political responsibilities to a professor of economics.’’

Early in our conversation, Salazar put great emphasis on Portugal’s
relative poverty; it was, he said, the poorest nation in Western Europe,
having a per capita income of $460 and an illiteracy rate of 40 percent.
But he seemed unaware that the deflationary policies he had imposed
on the country for three decades were in any way responsible for that
dismal situation. What did disturb him was that a successful African
insurgency might debouch more than half a million refugees into a
crowded metropole of nine million people at a time when Portugal’s
agriculture was stagnant and her industries undergoing painful read-
justment.

I he end of the Lusitanian presence in Af rica would, he pointed out,
almost inevitably precipitate an acute and prolonged depression in Por-
tugal, complicated by a balance of payments squeeze. In losing a monop-
olistic colonial market for her exports, Portugal would also be deprived
of the artificially cheap raw materials her obsolete industries needed to
compete in world markets. I bus the Prime Minister was convinced that,
if Portugal were to lose the last 800,000 square miles of her colonial
empire, she would forfeit even the shadow of respect as a small but sol-
vent power and would sink to the level of an Iberian Graustark.

1 hat such a fate should befall his tiny country was insupportable to
Salazar. His mind was still in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries,
when Portugal, a tiny nation of 1,500,000 people, had surpassed herself;
Lisbon had been the center of excitement, the heart of world explora-
tion, the capital that stirred the imagination of all civilized men. But,
after only a brief flowering, a spectacular day in the sun, Portugal had
fallen on evil days. When King Sebastian and the cream of the Portu-
guese nation were annihilated by the Moors in the Battle of the Three
Kings near Alcazarquivir, the golden age abruptly ended. Portugal’s
troubles mounted one on another: it lost its independence to Spain for
long periods; it saw its maritime preeminence usurped; and the Dutch

278 The Kennedy Years

captured its Asian possessions. Only the obdurate resistance of the set-
tlers in Angola and Brazil had saved those territories from foreign con-
quests and its most bitter blow came when its exhausting nineteenth-
century struggle against Napoleonic aggression was perversely rewarded
by the revolt and independence of Brazil, a possession larger than the
United States. That marked the beginning of the end of empire. When
I saw Salazar, Portugal had its back to the wall and knew it. Even though
the United Kingdom could face the loss of one-quarter of the globe
without ceasing to be a major nation, the loss of Angola and Mozam-
bique would be catastrophic for Portugal.

Dr. Salazar was determined that this would not happen. In spite of
its limited resources, Portugal, he insisted, was improving and extending
education in its African provinces. Racial discrimination, he stated flatly,
did not exist as in other parts of the White Redoubt; there were no laws
against intermarriage between Portuguese Europeans and blacks and
few social bars to people of mixed blood. Why then were we interfering
in what, I am convinced, Dr. Salazar still thought of as Portugal’s “civiliz-
ing mission ”? I was sure such a conception seemed as vital to him as to
St. Francis Xavier and the leaders of the Reconquista borrowed from
Spain.

I set forth in detail America’s belief in self-determination, but
Dr. Salazar would have none of it. To promise self-determination would,
he argued, destroy Portuguese influence in Africa, as well as the Portu-
guese presence. Experience in other countries had shown, he said, that
announced time schedules, no matter how foreshortened, were always
accelerated under pressure from the more radical African politicians.
The peoples of Angola and Mozambique were not yet ready for inde-
pendence. Considering all that had happened in the Congo (this was not
long after the Katanga episode), the maintenance of relative stability in
Portuguese Africa was, he argued, a real contribution to peace.

All this was said in answer to what he regarded as undue American
pressure. We had long urged Portugal to offer self-determination on a
reasonable time schedule; we had, in addition, supported Afro-Asian
initiatives in the United Nations designed toward that end. We had dis-
couraged American private investments in Angola and Mozambique,
refused Export-Import Bank loans to those areas, and prohibited the
sale of arms for use in the Portuguese overseas territories. Nonetheless,
in spite of the awkwardness in our relations, the Portuguese still permit-
ted us to use the Azores base for NATO purposes.

At the end of our second day of talks, Salazar mentioned that he
understood that I was going on to see Ayub Khan. Could I stop in Lis-
bon again on my return trip to Washington? He wanted, he said, an
opportunity to collect his thoughts and he hoped to be able to answer
some of my questions better on a second visit. After my return from

Ayub Khan and Salazar 279

Pakistan at the conclusion of our second set of meetings, Dr. Salazar
made a request that violated established protocol. “I have found our
conversations useful and interesting,” he said, “but I would like to give
you a more reasoned reply. When you get back to Washington would
you please write me a letter setting forth in detail the position you have
outlined in our conversations? Write it to me personally, and I will send
you a personal reply.”

Obviously, it was odd for a mere Under Secretary of State to be writ-
ing a head of government. But on October 21, 1963, I sent him a fifteen-
page, single-spaced letter, and, on February 27 of the following year, he
sent me a reply of roughly equal length. Even today the exchange is, I
think, of interest, not merely as an odd departure from protocol but also
because each letter was a thoughtful, honest effort to express a point of
view. Even though those points of view could not be reconciled by our
two governments, we still understood one another better.

Letter to Salazar

In my letter to Dr. Salazar I pointed out that Europe, following the
Renaissance, had broken out of its small peninsula to extend its influ-
ence to the corners of the earth. But the ravages of two world wars had
drained Europe of the power necessary to sustain world-wide control
and the new technology that made possible the instantaneous commu-
nication of “those subtle provocateurs of change — ideas” had made a new
order inevitable.

Europe had assured the demise of its imperial system by educating
its dependent peoples in the doctrines of Western political thought — the
dignity of the individual, the notion of the nation-state, the right of
societies to self-determination. Now the drive toward self-determination
could be frontally opposed only at an exceptionally high price — and a
price that, once paid, tended to go higher. Wise nations had not sought
to block the tide but to build canals and conduits to direct its flow —
seeking to work with the forces of history rather than against them. When
the metropolitan powers had built a trained civil service and given their
colonies substantial self-government, they had been able to maintain close
and mutually profitable relations after independence.

Because we saw value in retention of close ties between the new states
and their metropolitan patrons, we were anxious for Portugal to play an
effective and continuing role in Angola and Mozambique. The problem
would not be resolved by military might. Whenever colonial powers had
sought to maintain their hold on dependent areas by force they had
sooner or later given up the struggle.

l ime, I insisted, was not working in Portugal’s favor. It had no longer
than a decade to prepare its territories for self-determination and the

280 The Kennedy Years

time factor had to be realistically incorporated in Portuguese govern-
ment policy. Thus Portugal, in our view, should immediately make clear
that its goal was self-determination within a reasonable, although not
necessarily explicit, period.

There were, I pointed out, responsible African leaders anxious to
work with the West and, though Salazar had expressed doubt on this
matter, I had rechecked our information since returning to Washington.
We recognized that immediate independence would be a disaster — there
had to be a transition period lasting over a period of years if there were
to be a continuing Portuguese role. But it was necessary to establish
immediately the right of self-determination — not its implementation , which
could come about only after a gradual process of preparation.

Letter from Salazar

Dr. Salazar’s reply presented a careful apologia for his firmly held
position. His letter began by noting that American leaders regarded the
nationalist movement of peoples in Africa toward independence as an
inevitable fact that “must deny the pre-existing right and attempt to cre-
ate a new right.” That being the case, Salazar wrote, “the United States
naturally considers itself unobligated to defend the former and disposed
to recognize the latter.”

The drafters of the United Nations Charter found that a number of
states had dependent territories in which the geographic situation, social
structure, or economic or cultural development, as well as the race and
language of the majority of the inhabitants, substantially differed from
that of the metropolitan power. Those territories were politically on a
more or less inferior plane.

The Portuguese overseas territories, on the contrary, were not
dependent territories, but politically integrated. Portugal had been
admitted to the United Nations in that constitutional form, but the United
Nations resolutions since voted with regard to Portugal had not treated
“self-determination” as a choice among various alternatives provided in
the Charter; they had demanded the imposition of a single alternative —
independence. Yet immediate independence denied the natural evolu-
tion of the peoples and the existence of an enlightened political prepa-
ration.

Salazar was, he wrote, not questioning the sincerity of the American
government’s adherence to the principle of self-determination, nor did
he regard our position as inspired by self-interest. But we had not been
consistent in applying the principle. Our vigorous actions had in some
cases resulted in territorial fragmentation, in others we had, by force of
arms, imposed political unity on a particular territory. The experience
of the new states had shown that, when tribal leaders constituted the

Ayub Khan and Salazar 281

political elite existing at the time of independence, one might expect
political institutions with a certain stability— arising in effect from tribal
discipline; when that condition did not exist, the political structure of a
new state was precarious and could survive only with substantial eco-
nomic and military support from the former metropole. To the extent
that political stability depended primarily on the tribal structure, move-
ment was retrograde toward a more primitive organization of the coun-
try; when it was based on exterior assistance, the new nation had merely
a kind of pseudo independence or disguised sovereignty. Portugal was
prepared to provide resources for the normal development of its over-
seas territories so long as they remained under existing constitutional
arrangements. But it could not and would not support the vast subsidies
needed to maintain the economy of newly independent African states
for the benefit of foreigners and for unlimited periods. If, therefore, we
forced independence too quickly, Portugal’s responsibilities would have
to be assumed by a third country.

I hus, Salazar concluded, the full independence of Portugal’s over-
seas territories would neither guarantee the progress of the peoples nor
assure the continuance of a Portuguese “presence, influence and inter-
est in Africa (the language I had used in my letter). I had suggested,
however, that an intermediate preparatory period might be useful and
possible. The Portuguese government had considered this possibility and
accorded some good faith to the declaration of certain Af rican leaders
in favor of a program of evolution toward independence. But, wrote
Salazar, such a program was not feasible, not only because of the vio-
lence of the African revolutionary movement, but because of the inevi-
table intervention of “interests foreign to the African continent itself.”
After all, it was the violent elements who gave the orders and, as Salazar
dryly commented, he had not observed that the great powers opposed
them.

For these reasons, Salazar did not believe it feasible on the practical
plane to say nothing of the juridical plane — to develop in concert with
any other countries a plan of action that would assure a continuing Por-
tuguese presence in the African territories.

Finally, he concluded, we must be wary of Communism. We had put
great emphasis on the obvious lack of suitability of the Communist
structure to African societies, but that did not mean that Africa would
remain hostile to international Communism or that Communism could
not opeiate in Africa as it did in Europe and in America. Having made
a false step in its African policy, the Soviets would, he felt, stop form-
ing African political parties with the Communist label. Though they
might make use of local elements that would set up Communist gov-
ernments, they would direct their energies, he suggested, at taking
over Africa for the purpose of nationalizing its wealth, halting its eco-

282 The Kennedy Years

nomic progress and then bringing about “its ideological and strategic
neutralization.”

Though he granted that Western policy and even Soviet policy
seemed to be aimed toward preventing a general conflict, little by little
positions and interests would be lost and in the end the sum total of these
losses might be about the same as those that would result from a defeat
of the West in a general war.

Today this exchange of letters is of merely historical interest. Angola
is under the control of a government friendly to the Soviets, though the
guerrilla forces of UNITA under Jonas Savimbi still challenge the gov-
ernment’s control of the rural areas in the southern half of the country.
Twenty thousand Cuban troops train Angolan forces and help fight the
“insurgents,” while eight thousand Cuban civilians deal with education
and services. More than three hundred thousand Portuguese have
returned to the metropole. Salazar is dead.

Visit to Ayub Khan

In contrast to Dr. Salazar, a man of the sixteenth century, President
Ayub Khan of Pakistan was straight out of Kipling’s nineteenth-century
Indian tales. A graduate of the old Indian Army prior to the partitioning
of the subcontinent, he was almost a caricature of the spit-and-polish
British officer; immaculately turned out in tailored uniform with a care-
fully cropped moustache, he carried about him the aura of command
and the bluntness of a seasoned soldier. A conversation in depth with
Ayub Khan did not require the subtlety and delicatesse of a similar talk
with Salazar. He and I could come straight to the point and stay on it.
The gravamen of the Pakistan complaint was simple and straightfor-
ward. When we provided military aid to the Indians, we not only turned
our backs on an ally but also undercut its security. Could Pakistan, there-
fore, count on us? My country was, on its side, equally concerned about
Pakistan’s tilting toward China.

The corrosive relations between America and Pakistan that were rap-
idly developing reflected, in part, the festering enmity between Pakistan
and its neighbor India that had existed ever since the partition in 1947.
Kashmir was a continuing bone of contention; the Pakistanis were
implacably furious at India’s unwillingness to subject the issue to a ref-
erendum. During the winter of 1963-64, the United States had done
everything possible to bring about a settlement. Meanwhile, conspirato-
rial elements in Pakistan, largely led by Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto, were cautiously flirting with the Chinese, on the classical princi-
ple that the enemy of their enemy, India, was automatically their friend.
Bhutto assured his countrymen that China would come to Pakistan s
defense in the event of an Indian attack.

Ayub Khan and Salazar 2 83

In order to calm Indian feelings, I had initially intended to go not
only to Pakistan but also to New Delhi. But Chester Bowles, who had
only just returned to New Delhi as ambassador, vehemently rejected the
idea on the ground that he could not, without loss of face, receive the
man who had so recently succeeded him as Under Secretary. Thus, New
Delhi was canceled from the itinerary.

Even without a visit to India, arrangements for my trip proved awk-
ward. Initially the Pakistan government — no doubt inspired by Bhutto’s
anti-American drive — tried to restrict my conversations with the Presi-
dent and reduce the visit generally to a discussion with the Pakistani
foreign office, of which Bhutto was head. When we made clear that I
would not make the trip on that basis, that edict was reversed, but the
road remained filled with booby traps.

On August 30, four days before my visit, Pakistan signed a civil air
agreement with Communist China, giving China landing rights in Paki-
stan and, among other places, in Dacca. In response, we held up a prom-
ised $4.3 million loan to Pakistan that would have provided Dacca with
a new airport. I hen Pakistan further offended Washington by raising
its legation in Cuba to embassy status. Finally, just on the eve of my
arrival in Pakistan, an influx of Chinese Communist trade delegates
descended on Rawalpindi, the garrison town that served as Pakistan’s
temporary seat of government pending the building of its new capital at
Islamabad.

Under the circumstances, my talks with Ayub Khan were destined to
be difficult, since the whole Pakistan-United States relationship was now
in the balance. I was in no position to agree to President Khan’s demand
that the United States reduce its military aid to India. As a sanction, we
could, if necessary, cut off our foreign aid to Pakistan then running at
the rate of nearly $500 million a year, but that would tend to drive the
Pakistanis even further toward Peking. The Pakistanis, on their part,
were making self-destructive threats, suggesting that they might refuse
to accept our foreign aid if we attached any strings. We had already
provided Pakistan with something like $2 billion of aid, but I had long
ago learned that nations did not necessarily respond to their own
enlightened self-interest; I deeply distrusted Bhutto and the faction he
commanded.

Since my task was not only to persuade President Ayub Khan that we
would defend Pakistan, but also to show the Pakistani army and air force
how effectively we could do so, I asked Secretary McNamara to lend me
a competent military spokesman. He designated Major General William
Quinn an exceptionally engaging officer, with a gift for lucid exposi-
tion. Quinn, in turn, produced an airplane. We arrived in Rawalpindi
on September 3. I spent Tuesday morning with the embassy staff, then
met with President Ayub Khan late in the afternoon. Our conversation

284 The Kennedy Years

was gratifyingly direct, and we at least gained a full understanding of
each other’s views.

Kashmir was an issue we could not avoid, but the main focus of Ayub
Khan’s comments concerned our arming of India. I hough I empha-
sized our good-faith commitment to defend Pakistan, Ayub Khan was
by no means fully persuaded, although our conversation quieted some
of his anxieties. I pounded away on our disquiet over Pakistan’s drift
toward China and I warned him not to be seduced by Chinese overtures.
That the Chinese were engaged in such a seduction was suggested by
the poem of a member of the visiting Chinese trade delegation, pub-
lished on the day of my arrival.

You [Pakistanis] are on the western
coast of the sea and we are on the east.

The tidal waves on the ocean roar, and,
intermingled, we can hear the sound of
our heartbeat.

Though I spent some time with Ayub Khan that first evening, he
seemed disinclined to go very far with our conversation until after I had
been subjected to a series of expositions by Pakistani military and foreign
policy experts. They would, I assumed, give me their highly charged
view of Pakistan’s attitude toward the issues in question.

Ayub Kahn’s intention was, I assumed, to pass the responsibility to
Foreign Minister Bhutto and to give the commander of the Pakistani
army, General Mohammad Musa, and his colleagues a chance to air their
feelings. Ayub Khan was clearly not trying to avoid further confronta-
tion, as he asked me to lunch the following day and said that he would
be available whenever I wanted to confer with him.

The following day I met with Bhutto and his staff as well as with the
Pakistani military. The military discussions went into considerable tacti-
cal detail. The Pakistani high command gave us a detailed look at their
vulnerabilities, while General Quinn briefed them on our assessment of
the situation and what the United States could do to assure their secu-
rity.

I had a long tete-a-tete with Ayub Khan on September 5 and left late
in the afternoon. I gained the clear impression that he genuinely wanted
to repair relations with the United States but, hard pressed by others in
the leadership, was not a wholly free agent. For the time being, he was
quite ready to put the Kashmir issue in cold storage; the main thrust of
his argument was that we should do everything possible to stop the com-
petitive arms buildup between Pakistan and India. He was not seeking
fresh offers of military hardware from us so much as the assurance that
we would try to cut down military expenditures on both sides. Since the
military element in his government’s budget was already excessive, he
was anxious to limit further defense outlays.

Ayub Khan and Salazar 285

Clearly he was under domestic pressure, fearful of palace struggles
led by such insidious connivers as Bhutto and disturbed by the mounting
public hysteria stimulated by an intemperate Pakistani press. The news
columns were filled with slogans, such as “Better Communist domina-
tion than Hindu domination” and “A new devil is better than a thou-
sand-year-old devil.” While I was still in Rawalpindi, Ayub Khan felt
compelled to crack down with new harsh censorship measures.

I did my best to persuade the Pakistanis that the critical threat to
their security was from Communist China, not India, and that India and
Pakistan ought to concentrate on their mutual defense against Peking.
If Pakistan got too close to Communist China, it would nullify any alli-
ance between the United States and Pakistan.

My visit was anything but relaxed. (After my first interview, my col-
leagues and I sat up until two in the morning drafting telegrams and
planning strategy.) Yet it was not wholly without humor. Knowing Ayub
Khan shared his own passion for golf, General Quinn had come equipped
for a game. I gave him mock-serious instructions beforehand about the
need to let Ayub Khan win; by beating the President he would, I told
him, jeopardize our mission. After the game, the General reported
shamefacedly that he had definitely planned to lose on the final hole,
but, when they had finished the seventeenth green and he was still two
strokes ahead, it had abruptly started to rain. I made the appropriate
gestures of dismay.

Later, on September 9, I met with President Kennedy to brief him
on our trip and asked General Quinn to accompany me. After reporting
on all that had happened in Portugal and Pakistan, I said, “Mr. Presi-
dent, I would like you to know that General Quinn was a monument of
strength for our mission. His briefings were brilliant, and he made a
great impact on the Pakistan military command. At the same time, in all
candor, I must say that he violated my orders on one matter and almost
destroyed the effectiveness of the mission.”

“What did he do?” asked the President. I explained that I had told
General Quinn to lose to Ayub Khan but that he had come back with the
obviously unconvincing explanation that his plan to lose had been
thwarted by a sudden rainfall.

“Is that true, General?” asked the President. General Quinn looked
embarrassed and uneasy. “Yes, I’m afraid it is, Mr. President.” “Gen-
eral, said the President, “that’s a very serious accusation. What’s your
handicap?” The general named a figure which was, as I recall, 6 or 7.
“Well,” said the President with a broad grin, “you and I must have a
game some day.”

I remember another anecdote that involved my final tete-a-tete with
President Ayub Khan. Just as I was leaving, I said to him, “Mr. Presi-
dent, I would like to ask you a question quite unrelated to my mission,
merely to satisfy my own curiosity. Pakistan is a nation of more than

286 The Kennedy Years

ninety million people; it is Islamic by constitution and non-Arab. There
is only one other country in the world with similar characteristics and
that’s Indonesia. It has a population of perhaps one hundred million
people, is Islamic by constitution and non-Arab. I’ve often wondered
why you don’t make more common cause with the Indonesians.”

“Do you really want to know, Mr. Secretary?” When I nodded in the
affirmative he replied, “Well, the answer’s very simple. Sukarno’s such a
shit.”

It was a conversation I enjoyed reporting to the President.

20. Tke Cuban Missile Crisis

On a coffee table in my house in Princeton is a small piece of
wood surmounted by a silver plate, on which is inscribed in the top left-
hand corner “GWB” and in the top right-hand corner “JFK.” Engraved
on the plate is a calendar for October 1962 with the days from the six-
teenth to the twenty-eighth heavily outlined. The fortnight thus cele-
brated has a special meaning for all who possess similar plaques; it was
the period of what has come to be called the Cuban Missile Crisis, and
the plaques were gifts by President Kennedy to members of the so-called
ExCom, who worked with him during that intense period. Although those
two weeks left a permanent mark on all involved in that crisis, I find the
subject difficult to write about. More than any other event of the brief
thousand days of John E. Kennedy’s leadership, the Cuban Missile Crisis
has been minutely described and endlessly dissected.

Background of the Crisis

There were good reasons not to expect the Soviets to put offensive
missiles in Cuba. After the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, Chair-
man Nikita Khrushchev had sent President Kennedy two notes; in the
first, he warned that Cuba could count on Soviet support to resist any
armed attack from the United States, and, in the second, he stated that
“the Soviet Union did not have any bases in Cuba” and did not intend
to establish any. We took that latter assurance at face value; the Russians
had never put offensive missiles on the territory of other nations, even
members of the Warsaw Pact.

But, beginning in late July 1962 our reconnaissance planes reported
a substantial increase in ship traffic from Soviet ports to the Cuban port
of Mariel. That awakened curiosity in intelligence circles, particularly as
the ships seemed to be carrying transportation, electronic, and construe-

The Cuban Missile Crisis 28 7

tion equipment — presumably to improve coastal and air defenses. They
might also, we suspected, be carrying SAMs (surface-to-air missiles), which
were sophisticated antiaircraft weapons, defensive in character, which
the Soviets had already supplied to Iraq and Indonesia. In addition, sev-
eral thousand Soviet military technicians were reported to have arrived,
though they were never seen in uniform.

On August 29, one of our U-2 spy planes obtained photographic
proof that two SAMs had been put into position and that six more were
tentatively located, but that in itself seemed no cause for concern. The
Soviets, I assumed — to the extent I thought about it at all — were simply
reacting to post-Bay-of-Pigs Cuban pressure to protect Cuba against
another attack. They had been careful to deny any objective beyond that,
and I doubted that even Khrushchev would run the risk of being caught
in a flat lie to the President of the United States.

John McCone, the head of the CIA, was somewhat more skeptical.
Why would the Soviets, he speculated, install expensive SAMs unless
they had something valuable of their own to protect, such as offensive
missiles to be implanted at a future time? He had, so he later said, wor-
ried for some time that, once the Soviets found themselves free to use
Cuban territory, they might introduce offensive missiles. They had
refrained from installing offensive missiles in their Eastern European
satellites from fear that the Poles and Hungarians might fire them at
Moscow, but missiles in Cuba with a one-thousand-mile range could not
reach the Soviet Union.

But, however much McCone may have worried, he did not, to my
knowledge, mention his concerns to the President or to the rest of us;
instead, prior to the actual discovery of the missiles, he went off to Europe
on a honeymoon. Meanwhile, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin
passed on to the President’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Ken-
nedy, a private assurance from Khrushchev that he would not create
trouble for the United States during the election campaign. Dobrynin
also said, in answer to Robert Kennedy’s inquiry, that his government
certainly did not intend to arm any third party with the power to begin
a thermonuclear war. Even with that assurance, the President — at Rob-
ert Kennedy’s instigation — had issued a warning that the introduction
of offensive ground missiles in Cuba would raise grave issues and on
September 7 had asked for Congressional authorization to call up 150,000
reserve troops.

Until then, we had been sending biweekly flights of U-2 spy planes
to overfly Cuba, but, once the SAMs were discovered, the schedule was
stepped up. On September 21, the CIA received an eyewitness report
from an agent in Cuba who reported that, on September 12, he had seen
the tailpiece of a large missile on a Cuban highway. Other bits of evi-
dence soon tended to confirm that this could have been an offensive

288 The Kennedy Years

missile. Until then, no U-2 flights had been scheduled over the western
end of the island for fear of losing a plane, but that territory was now
targeted in a flight plan approved on October 9. Five days later, on Sun-
day, October 14, U-2 photographs showed what was presumably a mis-
sile site in preparation, although no missile was yet in sight.

Discovery of the Missile Sites

For the preceding several days, I had been in Panama and Colombia
and did not return to Washington until Sunday night. On Monday,
October 15, I had been scheduled to attend a reception for the National
Foreign Policy Conference, and later a black-tie dinner for West Ger-
man Foreign Minister Schroeder. For reasons not now clear to me, I had
cancelled the dinner and was at home when Roger Hilsman, Director of
the State Department’s Intelligence and Research, telephoned to report
that a preliminary analysis of U-2 pictures showed that the Soviets were
installing offensive missiles in Cuba. That news was a shock, since I had
long thought McCone too hard-line and suspicious. Moreover, along with
others in the top command, I had been vigorously trying to refute the
charges, then being repeated by Senator Keating in a whole series of
speeches, that the Soviets had put offensive missiles in Cuba. He was, we
thought, overinterpreting the same unverified intelligence report we had
received.

I slept little that night and the next morning was called to a secret
meeting at the White House at 1 1 145. At the direction of the President,
McGeorge Bundy had assembled a special group, consisting of Secretary
Rusk, Secretary McNamara, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Gen-
eral Maxwell Taylor, General Carter (the acting chief of the CIA while
McCone was temporarily out of town), Roswell Gilpatric (the Deputy
Secretary of Defense), Edwin Martin (the Assistant Secretary of State
for Inter-American Affairs), Theodore Sorensen (the President’s
Assistant and speech writer), Secretary of the Treasury Dillon, Ambas-
sador Charles Bohlen, and the President’s appointments secretary, Ken-
neth O’Donnell — in addition to Mac Bundy and myself. It was an ad hoc
collection; such a sensitive matter seemed inappropriate for the National
Security Council, which included among its statutory members such
extraneous figures as the head of the Office of Emergency Management
(concerned primarily with domestic housekeeping).

We agreed at the outset that no one should cancel any appointments
under circumstances that might lead the press to suspect a crisis. Thus,
Secretary Rusk left to meet the Crown Prince of Libya at the airport,
while Adlai Stevenson came down from New York to attend a White
House luncheon for the prince. All of us recognized that we faced a

The Cuban Missile Crisis 289

critical challenge from Moscow. Khrushchev, having harassed America
for more than a year by demanding a Berlin settlement on his own terms,
was now, we believed, about to try a new tactic. As soon as his missiles
were installed, which would be sometime after the United States elec-
tion, he would try to force the Western powers out of Berlin in exchange
for their removal. Another possibility was that he wished to trade off the
Cuban missiles for the American Jupiter missiles based in Turkey and
Italy, but since the Jupiters were antiquated and not very useful, that
seemed unlikely. Clearly the whole affair must be kept secret until we
could develop a carefully reasoned response. It would be far better to
announce the emplacement of the missiles at the same time we disclosed
the measures we were taking to force their removal. Meantime, we would
greatly step up the number of overflights.

We knew, of course, that we were operating under time constraints.
We had to force the issue before any missiles were fully installed or we
risked their being fired. During the first day, the discussion proceeded
with little structure, each of us putting forward his view as to what to do.
In the afternoon, we moved the locus of the meeting (minus the Presi-
dent) from the White House to my conference room in the State
Department but returned to the White House at 6:30 p.m. for more dis-
cussions.

One question in dispute was whether the emplacement of the mis-
siles would in any way change the power balance. At the beginning,
McNamara pointed out that the Cuban missiles would give the Russians
no advantage not already provided by their intercontinental rfiissiles in
the Soviet Union, except for the reduction of the warning time from
fifteen minutes to two or three minutes. And at first McGeorge Bundy
contended that we should not treat the matter as a major issue. But
alteration of the strategic military balance was not the only considera-
tion; United States’ acquiescence in the emplacement of the missiles would
have a disastrous political effect. The thought of having missiles so dose
to our shores would deeply upset our own people — not to mention the
Latin Americans. It would be a critical blow to the Monroe Doctrine —
or, to put it in more modern terms, an unacceptable Soviet encroach-
ment on the United States’ sphere of influence.

Even the military analysis seemed, as we thought about it, subject to
question. We could not be certain that our intelligence services had not
overestimated the number and accuracy of long-range Soviet intercon-
tinental missiles, in which case shorter-range missiles in Cuba might
greatly increase Soviet capability. Paul Nitze, then Assistant Secretary of
Defense for International Security Affairs, was particularly concerned
that, if the new missiles should become operational, the Soviets could
destroy a large part of the American strategic bomber force.

2go The Kennedy Years
Hawks and Doves

As the conversation proceeded, the ExCom began to break into two
groups. Nitze, Douglas Dillon, and John McCone, among others, felt
that we should promptly launch an airstrike to remove the missile bases
by force. McNamara, Gilpatric, Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson (just
returned after several years in Moscow), and I opposed any irrevocable
action, since it would involve killing probably as many as twenty-five
thousand Russians and thus risk a violent Soviet reaction.

The next morning, Wednesday, October 17, while the President was
out campaigning, the ExCom continued its intensive meetings in my
conference room, now unimaginatively nicknamed the Think Tank. It
was in a special compound on the seventh floor directly across a corridor
from my office, which, in turn, was separated from the Secretary’s office
only by the office of the secretariat. Thus it was well segregated from
the rest of the Department. During that first week, our meetings went
on every day and late into the night; sandwiches and coffee were sent
for as needed. Dean Rusk attended only a few of the meetings — and
then only briefly. He felt that as the principal foreign policy adviser to
the President he should not air his comments in a general meeting with
lower-level people but reserve them for the President himself. In the
course of the hours and days that passed, two participants carried the
greatest authority: McNamara and Robert Kennedy. McNamara has a
natural flair for command and whenever he was in the room he tended
to dominate the discussion. He has an unusually quick and incisive mind
and supreme self-assurance. During these meetings I found him both
impressive and slightly exasperating — exasperating perhaps because he
was so forceful.

Robert Kennedy surprised me. Until then I had not had much respect
for his judgment; he had seemed to me — particularly in comparison with
his brother — immature, far too emotional, and inclined to see every-
thing in absolute terms with too little sensitivity to nuance and qualifica-
tion. But during the Cuban missile affair he was a stabilizing influence.
Aware of the gravity of the situation, he was a force for caution and good
sense.

Eventually, we reduced the possible responses to six. They cut across
the full spectrum, including such actions as confronting the Soviet Union
with photographic evidence and demanding the removal of the missiles,
sending an emissary to Khrushchev, and dragging the Soviet Union and
Cuba into the United Nations Security Council. Soon, however, atten-
tion narrowed on the two remaining: embargoing military shipments to
Cuba through a naval blockade (which we came to refer to as the “Slow
Track”), or mounting a surprise bombing attack on the missile installa-

The Cuban Missile Crisis 291

tions (known as the “Fast Track”), which involved, if necessary, following
up with an invasion.

From the beginning, I opposed an airstrike, not merely because it
would kill several thousand people, but because it was an irreversible
step. Moreover, as I first argued on Wednesday, a great power should
never act in contravention of its own traditions or it would lose its world
authority; to launch a surprise air attack would seriously undercut the
effectiveness of our leadership. To my gratification, the Attorney Gen-
eral later restated my argument in much more vivid and compelling
terms. A surprise airstrike, he said, would be another Pearl Harbor and
he added, with obvious conviction, “My brother is not going to be the
I ojo of the 1960s.” It was a telling phrase, and I thought at the time that
it altered the thinking of several of my colleagues.

I was disturbed by the reaction of my long-time friend Dean Ache-
son, who attended several of our meetings. Acheson, I knew, thought
Bobby Kennedy an upstart. He had not liked Bobby since his association
with Joe McCarthy, and he now thought, as he clearly indicated not only
by his words but also by the emphatic way he spoke, that Bobby was
talking sentimental nonsense. The United States, Acheson argued, had
specifically stated in the Monroe Doctrine that it would not tolerate the
intrusion of a European power in this hemisphere; the President had
explicitly told Congress that America would be forced to act if the Soviet
Union installed offensive weapons in Cuba; and, on October 3, a
Congressional resolution had authorized the President to prevent “by
whatever means may be necessary, including the use of arms, the crea-
tion in Cuba of a foreign military base that endangered United States
security.” Thus, concluded Acheson, there had been adequate warning,
and whatever we did could not be regarded as a surprise attack. As
eloquently expressed by Acheson, the argument was plausible, but I could
not accept what seemed to me its fundamental disregard for our inter-
national standing and our relations with other nations. Oddly enough, I
found myself sounding more legalistic than he. Because Cuba did not
belong to the Warsaw Pact, I conceded that an air attack on Cuba would
not necessarily bring the Soviets into a state of war, but a naval blockade
would have more “color of legality.” Acheson s insistence on an imme-
diate attack was not, I thought sadly, his finest hour.

On I hursday, October 18, we met twice with the President, at 1 1:00
a.m. and 10:00 p.m. Meanwhile, the Pentagon was positioning formida-
ble numbers of men and planes in case a decision was made either to
bomb or invade, and rumors of troop movements were beginning to
appear in the newspapers, though with no explicit linkage to Cuban mis-
siles. On the political side, I had instructed the State Department to draw
up detailed plans for obtaining the support of our Latin American and

292 The Kennedy Years

European allies. That morning (Thursday) the Intelligence Board
reported that the first Soviet missile could be ready for launching in
eighteen hours. We were, therefore, nearing the moment of action. When
I later met with Secretary Rusk, he expressed himself firmly against a
surprise attack; it would destroy any hope of political support. We would
invite universal opprobrium were we to act without first consulting the
Organization of American States and the United Nations and making a
prior effort to approach the Russians.

That evening, while Rusk was giving a dinner for Soviet Foreign
Minister Gromyko on the eighth floor of the State Department, the
ExCom continued to argue the central issues in my conference room,
one floor below. To sharpen the argument, we divided into two groups:
McGeorge Bundy headed the group developing the case for an airstrike
and the kind of scenario it would involve; I headed the team lavoring a
blockade. On my side of the argument were McNamara, Gilpatric, Rob-
ert Kennedy, Ambassador Thompson, and, finally, Robert Lovett, who
had been enlisted by the President. On the airstrike side were McCone,
Dillon, Taylor, Acheson, Nitze, and, finally, Bundy, who had reluctantly
swung toward an incisive response.

Advantages of the Blockade

There were risks in either course, but to my mind the blockade had
the incomparable advantage of giving the Russians time to back down
before we had taken any irrevocable action. Still, we knew that even a
blockade might degenerate into armed conflict if we were forced to sink
a Russian ship and a Russian submarine retaliated by sinking one of
ours. In the course of that evening, Dillon came over to the blockade
side, largely persuaded by Bobby Kennedy’s argument that we must be
true to ourselves as Americans. We supporters of a blockade felt it tac-
tically necessary to point out that such a course would not automatically
exhaust our options: we could limit the contraband list in the first instance
to offensive weapons and then expand it. We reinforced our position by
pointing out that we could still launch an airstrike or even an invasion if
the blockade proved ineffective.

At 10:00 p . m ., we went again to the White House. We were afraid too
many black limousines would attract undue attention, so nine of us piled
into my car, sitting two or three deep and instead of going directly to
the White House, we went to the Treasury, then by a secret set of pas-
sages through the White House bomb shelter into the White House base-
ment.

We stayed with the President until after midnight. During the meet-
ing it became apparent that he was strongly leaning toward a naval
blockade. He asked Ted Sorensen to draft a speech, and later that night

The Cuban Missile Crisis 293

I asked George Springsteen to call home the State Department’s legal
adviser, Abram Chayes, who was at a shipping meeting in Paris.
Springsteen, a model of effectiveness, did not waste words or the chance
of a leak from an insecure telephone. He told Chayes simply to come
home. When Chayes asked what was happening (“Is it Cuba?’’), Spring-
steen replied with masterful succinctness: “Just shut up and get back
here.’’

The following morning, Friday, October 19, the President again went
campaigning, but before leaving he heard second thoughts from some
of his advisers. The Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted him to reconsider and
order an airstrike or invasion, while Dean Acheson still obdurately
opposed a blockade. That morning, Pierre Salinger, the President’s press
secretary, had reported that reporters were beginning to ask questions
about troop movements in the direction of Florida, and we were deadly
afraid that the press would break the story before we had everything in
place. Rusk had raised some eyebrows among the reporters when he
cancelled a speech before the Business Council at Hot Springs, which
made it even more important that I keep a date to speak that same eve-
ning in Washington before the board of directors of the United States
Chamber of Commerce.

It was one of the most unpleasant evenings I can recall. Given the
restlessness throughout the country, I knew I would be asked questions
about missiles in Cuba and though I hated the idea of lying, any equiv-
ocation on my part could spark dangerous rumors. I therefore couched
my answers in circumlocutions, using diversionary and elaborate obfus-
cation. Later, the head of one of Chicago’s largest banks complained
angrily to my brother that, in the light of what had subsequently hap-
pened, it was clear that I had not been candid with the board of direc-
tors; he was quite outraged about it. Just how I could have been candid
and still have preserved an essential American strategy, he seemed nei-
ther to know nor care. Fortunately for America, he was not making the
decision. Immediately after my speech and the question period, I
returned to spend most of the night in the Think Tank, helping to
develop alternative scenarios.

During these hours, I formed great admiration for the technical
competence of some of my State Department colleagues, and particu-
larly Edwin Martin and U. Alexis Johnson who, working with Paul Nitze,
drafted the blockade scenario that took into account such contingencies
as a Russian riposte in the form of a Berlin Blockade, the possibility that
an air strike might be necessary even after our quarantine, and the chance
that the Soviets might attack the Jupiter missile sites in Turkey or Italy
or move against Iran. Throughout the whole of our sessions and the
weeks that followed, Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson showed almost
infallible judgment in predicting Khrushchev’s probable reactions.

294 The Kennedy Years

Among other things, he advised 11s that the Russians were impressed
with legality and might give weight to a resolution by the Organization
of American States endorsing the blockade. We set the lawyers to work
drafting the proper papers and examining whether a blockade would be
considered legal in international law if we could not obtain an OAS res-
olution. All this concern for legality and for the reaction of other coun-
tries annoyed Dean Acheson, who, recognizing that he was losing the
argument, departed for a weekend at his farm in Maryland. Meanwhile,
as the airstrike proponents found themselves increasingly outvoted, we
tried to mollify them by reiterating that a blockade was merely the first
step; if after a reasonable chance, it did not work and the Russians con-
tinued to emplace missiles, then we could again consider an airstrike.

Moving Toward Decision

The following Saturday, October 20, the President broke off cam-
paigning in Chicago on the excuse of a bad cold and a fever and returned
to the White House early that afternoon. That day, the Chinese started
to attack India over the Himalayan mountain barriers, which led some of
us to speculate that the Chinese might be moving in coordination with
the Soviets’ Cuban adventure. We met in the Think Tank at nine in the
morning to review the President’s speech as drafted by led Sorensen.
At 2:30 p.m., we met with the President in the Oval Office. Dean Rusk
had prepared a summary in his own handwriting, which he read to us
and then handed to the President, recommending the blockade track
primarily on the ground that an airstrike would be irreversible. After
hearing additional arguments from McNamara for the blockade, the
President told us that he wanted to begin with a limited step and that
bombing was too blunt an instrument. In his view, the blockade was the
way to start, though that did not rule out an airstrike in the future. He
was still expecting a Soviet move against Berlin, no matter what hap-
pened in Cuba.

The Stevenson Dissent

Adlai Stevenson, who had just arrived from New York, then outlined
a dissenting position. He proposed that, simultaneously with the Presi-
dent’s speech, which had been set for 7:00 p.m. on Monday, the United
States should call for an emergency session of the United Nations Secu-
rity Council, so that we could get a resolution on the table before the
Russians could submit one. I he crux of Stevenson’s argument was that
we should not only utilize the United Nations and the OAS but also
pursue other diplomatic moves, such as offering to withdraw from
Guantanamo as part of a plan to demilitarize and neutralize Cuba. He

The Cuban Missile Crisis 295

also wanted the President to consider offering to remove the Jupiters in
Turkey in exchange for the removal of Russian missiles from Cuba.

The President rejected both of these proposals, though he was will-
ing to discuss removing the Jupiters at the right time because they were
obsolete and had little military value. But they were there for the protec-
tion of NATO, and he did not propose to confirm the suspicions of de
Gaulle that the United States would sacrifice its allies’ interests.

I hough the President was courteous but firm, some of the others
present were outraged and shrill. Dillon, Lovett, and McCone violated
the calm and objectivity we had tried to maintain in our ExCom meet-
ings when they intemperately upbraided Stevenson. The attack was, I
felt, quite unfair, indicating more the state of anxiety and emotional
exhaustion pervading the discussion than any reasoned reaction. After
all, there was nothing new in any of Stevenson’s proposals. We had from
the beginning discussed a possible trade involving the removal of our
missiles from Turkey and even from Italy as a way out of the impasse,
and such a solution had at one time or another been put forward by,
among others, Averell Harriman and Harlan Cleveland. The President,
in addition to a number of his advisers, including both Bobby Kennedy
and Bob McNamara, had expressed the view that some such trade would
probably be necessary before the Soviets would accept our demand for
the missiles’ removal. McNamara had even suggested that we might have
to withdraw our missiles both in Italy and Turkey and even conceded
that we might ultimately have to abandon Guantanamo. I recognized the
cogency of these predictions and on Wednesday, October 24, after the
quarantine had been imposed, I notified Raymond Hare, our ambassa-
dor in Turkey as well as our NATO ambassador, Thomas Finletter, that
we were considering the possibility of a trade and asked their advice as
to probable Turkish and NATO reactions to such a move. The reply in
each case had been emphatically negative. In the end the President did
obliquely promise Khrushchev that the Turkish Jupiters would be with-
drawn, though only on condition that such a withdrawal would not appear
as a part of the Cuban missile settlement.

Thus, in urging that we offer such a trade, Stevenson was not putting
forth an idea not already discussed. The reason for the excessive expres-
sions of outrage was that he proposed it late in the day, after the Presi-
dent and the ExCom had already settled on another course. Not having
been present during the week-long argument, Stevenson appeared to
the weary members of the ExCom as ignoring all the anguished hours
of discussion that had already taken place. To be sure, all but the fiercest
hawks thought that we might have to offer the concessions Stevenson
suggested, but we would not offer them at the beginning; only after we
had tested out Soviet reactions to our quarantine and with luck had put
Khrushchev on the defensive.

2C}6 The Kennedy Years

Stevenson was obviously at a disadvantage. While we in Washington
had been arguing day and night under strong pressures for incisive
action, he continued to live in the United Nations shadow world, where
compromise was the invariable formula for solving all problems. He nec-
essarily considered actions in terms of their defensibility in UN proceed-
ings; he, after all, would have to carry the burden in the Security Council
and he wanted our case to be one he could win. He wanted, as he told
me, to show that we were willing to pay at least a token price for neu-
tralizing Cuba.

I felt protective of Adlai, embarrassed for him, and exceedingly
annoyed with my colleagues. I wondered if I might have saved him from
their anger by briefing him more adequately in advance as to the prob-
able mood of the meeting. On balance, I do not think so. He spoke out
of strong conviction. He was not a man to tailor his opinions to his
audience, and 1 doubt that the personal attack greatly bothered him. I
felt sorry for him and proud at the same time. Though he seriously hurt
his position — particularly with Robert Kennedy, who never liked him
much anyway — he maintained the respect of most of us (including the
President) as a man of forthright opinion.

To cushion the shock for our allies and minimize resentment at the
lack of advance consultation, the President proposed to send some of his
most respected advisers to inform the European heads of state. In spite
of Dean Acheson’s discontent with the course chosen, the President still
coopted him to call on the most prickly allied leader, President de Gaulle.
When Rusk telephoned Acheson on Saturday night to ask him to fly to
Paris the next day, he replied, “Of course, 1 11 do what the President
asks.” Then he quoted a saying of Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of
his idols, “We all belong to the least exclusive club in the world, but it’s
the club with the highest dues: the United States of America.

The Story Finally Leaks

I constantly marveled during the whole week of tension that we had
managed to avoid any serious press leak. I think we all expected the
story to break at any moment. My forebodings were confirmed on Sat-
urday night when I received a call from Scotty Reston of the New York
Times . From what he told me, it seemed clear that he had learned most
of the essential facts about the Soviet action and the proposed American
response. I was horrified but relieved that the story belonged to a cor-
respondent of such integrity. Would he please, I asked, hold off printing
anything? I strongly emphasized how badly America’s position might be
harmed by premature publication during an extremely grave crisis. We
talked for a while, and I exacted a promise that he would next call
McGeorge Bundy. The President then telephoned Orvil Dryfoos, the

The Cuban Missile Crisis

297

publisher of the Times, who agreed to denature the story to the point of
harmlessness. Subsequently that decision to withhold the news was seri-
ously debated within the precincts of the Times itself, and some con-
tended that the paper should have broken the story without regard to
any Presidential request or consequences to the country. I find the
argument tendentious and presumptuous; I cannot agree with Harrison
Salisbury, among others, who contends that the Times's judgment as to
what is good for the country in a highly dangerous situation is better
than the President’s. What was at issue, after all, was not a story of Pres-
idential chicanery or a cover-up of something that would have been
embarrassing to the Administration; it was war or peace.

1 o throw the press off the Cuban scent, we undertook diversionary
tactics. On Sunday, October 21, Averell Harriman, then Assistant Sec-
retary for Far Eastern Affairs, Martin Hillenbrand of the German affairs
office, and Phillips I albot, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern
Affairs, arrived conspicuously at the White House in order to inspire
press speculation about crises in China, India, or Berlin. Meanwhile,
ExCom members continued to use the basement passageway from the
I reasury through the White House bomb shelters. We met that morn-
ing in the Oval Office at 10:00 o’clock. While we were going over Soren-
sen s third draft of the speech that the President was to make Monday
evening, I broached an idea I had been toying with during the night.
Should we not try to spread the responsibility by holding Castro equally
responsible with Khrushchev? I hat might help Khrushchev get off the
hook. In practical terms, it would mean extending the blockade to include
petroleum shipments and other cargo the Cuban economy needed. But
it was, I instantly realized, a bad idea; as McNamara promptly pointed
out, the blockade should be kept as narrowly targeted and as simple as
possible. We had only one aim: to get the missiles out of Cuba. Adlai
Stevenson raised a valuable point by challenging the sentence in the
Sorensen draft that called for the Russians to “render the missiles inop-
erable ; the language should be made more explicit by demanding that
the Russians “dismantle and remove’’ the missiles.

Once the blockade decision had been made, the State Department
went into full action. Again the professionals showed their competence.

I op secret telegrams were drafted to our ambassadors all around the
world; a message was prepared for dispatch from the President to
Khrushchev; and special letters were drafted to forty-three heads of
government, including de Gaulle, Adenauer, Diefenbaker, Macmillan,
Nehru, and Fanfani.

What provided a particularly macabre background for our activities
was the weather. I hough we might be about to blow up the world, nature
had never seemed so luxuriant. The air was light and the sky crystal
clear. As Bob McNamara and I walked through the White House Rose

2g8 The Kennedy Years

Garden that Sunday, I remarked: “Do you remember the Georgia
O’Keefe painting of a rose blooming through an ox skull? That’s exactly
how I feel this morning.”

At 2:30 on Sunday we met together with the full membership of the
National Security Council for the first time since the beginning of the
crisis. Some cabinet members learned only then of the crisis, and they
gave their formal approval to the President’s projected course of action.
The following day, the Security Council validated the creation of the
Executive Committee by formally approving Action Memorandum 196,
which had established it. From then on until further notice, the ExCom
would meet with the President at ten o’clock each morning in the Cabi-
net Room.

The Day of the Speech

Monday, October 22, was a day of extreme nervousness. We heard
in the morning that Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko would have an
important statement for the press before flying home to Moscow that
afternoon; we were afraid that the Russians had discovered what was
about to happen and were planning some drastic countermove. There
were ominous rumors also to the effect that a Soviet prop jet was headed
for Cuba. At five o’clock, the President met with the Congressional lead-
ers only to find that most of them considered his quarantine idea inad-
equate. None doubted that we must take all necessary steps to get rid of
the missiles, but they thought a blockade not strong enough and would
have preferred an airstrike or some other aggressive military action.

Following the schedules Alex Johnson had worked out, at six o’clock
(one hour before the President was to speak), Rusk told Soviet Ambas-
sador Dobrynin what the President intended to say. He gave Dobrynin
a copy of the speech and read portions out loud. Also in accordance with
the schedule, I briefed forty-six ambassadors of allied countries at 6:15
in the State Department’s International Conference Room. Included were
the representatives from North Atlantic Treaty countries, those belong-
ing to the Central Treaty Organization, the Southeast Asian Treaty
Organization, and ANZUS. I described the background of our relations
with the Soviets over the use of Cuba as a military base and showed them
the evidence of the missile emplacements in Cuba, leaving it to Roger
Hilsman to supplement my statement by a more technical explanation
of the photocover. After outlining the main points of the President’s
message, I invited the ambassadors to remain and watch the President
on television. Just as the speech was about to begin, a note of black humor
crept in when a Savings and Foan commercial appeared with the ques-
tion, How much security does your family have? It sent the ambassadors
into nervous laughter. While I was briefing our allied ambassadors, Dean

The Cuban Missile Crisis 299

Rusk was briefing the ambassadors of the nonaligned and neutral coun-
tries, and Edwin Martin was briefing the ambassadors of the Organiza-
tion of American States.

Immediately after the President’s speech, I met with the diplomatic
press. I raised almost as many questions as I answered. “What will
Khrushchev do? Is he going to abide by the quarantine we are about to
establish? Is he going to try to run that quarantine or to break it? Is he
going to reply somewhere else in the world? We are prepared for what-
ever Khrushchev may decide.”

That night I slept fitfully on a couch in my office, waking from time
to time for a message from our Operations Center indicating any Soviet
reaction. The next morning, Secretary Rusk, who had gone home for a
quick nap, woke me with cheering news: “George, we’ve won a great
victory. You and I are still alive.” It reflected the prevailing mood. So far
the Russians had not moved against Berlin or bombed the Jupiter bases,
and we gained the impression that they had been taken by surprise and
were trying to decide what to do. (Perhaps somewhere in the Kremlin
another “think tank” was feverishly operating.) Then, in the morning
the Tass News Agency transmitted the Soviet government’s statement
charging President Kennedy with piracy, violations of international law,
and provocative acts: the standard Soviet farrago.

That Tuesday, October 23, after Rusk appeared and argued person-
ally, the Organization for American States (OAS) approved the quaran-
tine action by the unexpectedly large vote of nineteen to zero, thereby
legitimatizing our blockade, which, under the terms of the President’s
proclamation, was to be put into effect Wednesday, October 24, at 10:00
a.m. Eastern time. The question we asked ourselves, and one another,
was what would happen next. The U-2 photographs showed work still
continuing on the missile sites.

As the blockade line was drawn, nineteen ships of the United States
Second Fleet took up stations in a great arc extending five hundred miles
out to sea. On Monday, twenty-five Soviet ships had been reported strung
out across the Atlantic bound for Cuba. They had been spotted by naval
reconnaissance planes, and particular note was made of those carrying
deck cargo and those with extra large hatches wide enough to accom-
modate missiles.

Meanwhile, our emissaries had touched base with our principal allies.
President de Gaulle distinguished himself not only with our government
but also with the American people by his unequivocal response to Dean
Acheson — even before he had seen the missile photographs — that he
understood why the American President had acted and that France would
fully support us. But leading British newspapers failed to meet that stan-
dard of trust. They offended Americans (and infuriated our embattled
group in Washington) by challenging the authenticity of the missiles and

joo The Kennedy Years

deploring the President’s action. Some even snidely suggested that it was
an election ploy; and the British nuclear disarmers did not fail to display
that sanctimonious rejection of realism that has become their hallmark.

During a long ExCom session Wednesday morning, we continued to
worry about how to deal with the first ship interception, which, we
expected, would occur sometime during the day. Our forebodings deep-
ened with the report that work on the missile sites was proceeding at an
accelerated pace. That afternoon, the President authorized our infor-
mation service to release aerial photographs to give the lie to scoffers
and to establish with our friends that the missiles were irrefutably there.
The question of releasing the photographs had been hotly debated, and
even the President had been hesitant to disclose the extraordinary defi-
nition achieved by our cameras, but events fully vindicated the wis-
dom of disclosing the pictures to the world. Even the most cynical critic
or naive nuclear disarmer could no longer question the existence and
location of the missiles.

We carefully dissected all indications of Soviet reaction no matter
how fragmentary, including a curious message Chairman Khrushchev
gave to American businessman William Knox, whom he unexpectedly
summoned to the Kremlin. In the course of a long harangue, Khru-
shchev admitted that the Soviet Union had missiles and attack planes in
Cuba, but he wanted the President and the American people to know
that, if the United States navy tried to stop Soviet ships, his submarines
would start sinking American vessels.

Wednesday morning I learned from Adlai Stevenson that U 1 hant,
responding as always to the pressure of nonaligned nations, was calling
on the Soviets to suspend all arms shipments to Cuba and on the United
States to suspend its blockade for a period of two or three weeks. That
was anything but helpful. For us to accept the proposal would so relieve
Khrushchev of pressure that we would probably never be able to get the
missiles out of Cuba. In addition, the 1 hant proposal contained no pro-
vision for verification.

It was a day of intense anxiety. We believed that if our navy sank a
Russian ship, Khrushchev would react vigorously. Thus we were
momentarily relieved when, while meeting with the President in the
Cabinet Room, we received word that a dozen ol the Soviets’ twenty-five
ships had changed course or stopped. Still, we remained skeptical, spec-
ulating that Moscow might have some other purpose in mind: perhaps
that they rendezvous with Soviet submarines. Since the essence of our
blockade strategy was to avoid precipitate action and to give Khrushchev
time to think, the President directed that there be no shooting. Our navy
was to keep Soviet ships in view but not to board them without fresh
instructions.

The Cuban Missile Crisis 301

Waiting for a Collision

I hat night (Wednesday) I again stayed in my office, sleeping inter-
mittently, waking to read each report as it came into the Operations
Center. In addition, I had a problem to sort out with Stevenson; Wash-
ington and New York differed as to how the President should answer
Thant’s proposal, which was to be put to the Security Council that night.
I had urged Adlai to try to talk to Thant before the Security Council
meeting, since I wanted our objections on record before Thant spoke,
but Stevenson thought Thant would resent it. We were concerned in
Washington that the Soviets would immediately accept Thant’s proposal,
leaving us in the lonely position of rejecting the Secretary-General’s
unacceptable idea. We had expressed our opposition in a letter from the
President, which we wished Stevenson to deliver that night, but he
thought the letter was too rigid. He wanted its tone softened so that we
would not seem to be rejecting Thant’s proposal outright or indicating
that we were not even prepared to talk. I told Harlan Cleveland, the
Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs (and thus Ste-
venson’s conduit to the State Department), that if Stevenson continued
to resist our instructions I would have to get the President to overrule
him, since Kennedy wanted the letter delivered without delay. I tele-
phoned the President to tell him that I would try to persuade Stevenson
to talk with U Thant before U Thant spoke in the United Nations, but
that Stevenson might insist on hearing those instructions directly from
the President. At 11:15 that n ight, I again called the President to say
that I had just talked with Stevenson and had pointed out that the
U I hant proposal was unacceptable, among other reasons, because it
did not provide for inspection or verification. But Stevenson, I told him,
had dismissed the point, arguing that if we accepted Thant’s proposal,
we could then take up those questions in the conversation.

As the night wore on, we received regular reports that Soviet mer-
chantmen were approaching closer and closer to our line of destroyers.
All evening I had been trying to think of precautionary steps we might
have neglected. With the ships in motion, a clash might come at any
moment; events could then get quickly out of hand. Finally, I decided
that we should try to get Thant to call upon Khrushchev immediately to
stop his ships for twenty-four hours to avoid an irrevocable clash; we
would then have time to try to work things out. That would give Khru-
shchev a public excuse for doing what he might wish to do anyway.

I knew that Stevenson would resist if I tried on my own initiative to
get him to move that night, so toward midnight I called the President,
who favored the idea. I promptly telephoned Stevenson to ask that he
try to get Thant to act that same night. Adlai was reluctant to call Thant,
who had already gone home, but I pressed him and he promised to try.

j 02 The Kennedy Years

Later we talked again, and, at 12:20 in the morning, he called to say that
he had got Thant out of bed and Thant had agreed to send such a mes-
sage — but not until morning, because the communications were poor at
night.

Earlier that evening, Stevenson had had his now-famous altercation
with Soviet Ambassador Valerian Zorin. When he put it directly to Zorin
as to whether or not the Soviets were placing medium and intermediate
range missiles in Cuba, Zorin had promised him an answer in due course.
Stevenson had then dramatically replied, “I am prepared to wait for my
answer until hell freezes over, if that’s your decision. And I am also pre-
pared to present the evidence in this room.” Thereupon he had revealed
the photographs with devastating effect. For Adlai, it was the kind of
triumph he liked the most and richly deserved.

Next morning, our air surveillance still showed work rapidly going
forward on the missile bases, but Naval Intelligence now definitively
confirmed that twelve of the twenty-five ships had in fact turned back.
Presumably those twelve carried incriminating cargo and could not risk
running the blockade. Meanwhile, I repeatedly needled Stevenson to get
Thant to send his appeal to Khrushchev to stop all the ships for twenty-
four hours. Finally, at 2:26 p.m., Thant did send such a message, asking
that Soviet ships keep out of our interception area for a limited time ‘‘to
permit discussion of the modalities of a possible agreement. . . .” He also
sent a letter to President Kennedy referring to his message to Khru-
shchev and asking that “instructions be issued to United States vessels to
do everything possible to avoid direct confrontation with Soviet ships in
the next few days in order to minimize the risk of any untoward inci-
dent.” To that Kennedy replied that if the Soviet ships already on the
way to Cuba were to “stay away from the interception area for the lim-
ited time required for preliminary discussion,” Thant could be assured
that United States vessels would abide by his request. On Friday,
Khrushchev advised Thant that the Soviets would also abide by his
request but insisted that the period of such constraint could not “be of
long duration.”

My modest initiative had at least helped to bring a brief delay in a
possible clash between our navy and a Soviet ship that refused our
boarding demand. That danger was further diminished when the Pres-
ident ordered our navy, against strong protests from some of the more
hard-line ExCom members, to let a Soviet tanker, the Bucharest , pass
through without boarding after identifying herself by radio and declar-
ing that she carried only petroleum. The same treatment was also
accorded to an East German cruise ship. Though I supported the Pres-
ident’s action as strongly as possible, some of my ExCom colleagues vig-
orously protested that our failure to board every ship would send the
wrong signal to Khrushchev. We all knew that at some point soon we

The Cuban Missile Crisis 303

would have to stop a ship if our blockade were to be credible, so a Pan-
amanian-owned ship, the Marucla, under Soviet charter, was chosen as
the least provocative. Our navy boarded it Friday morning and, as we
had fully expected, found it to contain no contraband. We received the
news while the ExCom was meeting. We would have felt greater relief
had our intelligence not continued to report that work on the missile
sites was being speeded up.

1 hat led the ExCom’s more belligerent members to step up their
pressure for an immediate airstrike before the missiles were ready to
fire. They had a certain logic on their side; the objective of the blockade
was to induce the Soviets to dismantle the missile sites in Cuba before
they became operational, and, if we could not achieve that objective
merely by a blockade, we might have to take some other action. We could
not, as we saw it, let the missiles become operational, since once that
occurred relative bargaining positions would be irrevocably altered, and
the danger of a nuclear foray greatly increased. Once the missiles were
on station, an airstrike might precipitate their bring, since no strike could
be sure of taking out all of them. So most of my colleagues seemed con-
vinced that, if the Soviets continued work on the sites, we could not wait
much beyond Sunday to make the decision to send in our planes. More-
over, my more hawkish colleagues, such as Nitze and McCone, were
skeptical that an airstrike would by itself be enough; they would almost
certainly press for an invasion, and plans went forward on that basis.

Message from Khrushchev

We were intently alert for any signs that might indicate a softening
of the Soviet position. So far, communications between the President
and Khrushchev had elicited only traditional Soviet bellicosity. Then news
came from an unexpected quarter. John Scab, a correspondent for the
American Broadcasting Company (later our ambassador to the United
Nations), was suddenly invited to lunch by a counsellor at the Soviet
embassy named Alexander S. Fomin (who was presumed to be a KGB
colonel and chief of the Soviet intelligence operations in the United
States). Fomin, in a high state of excitement, asked if the State Depart-
ment would be interested in settling the dispute on the following basis:
the Soviets would dismantle and remove the missiles in Cuba, and the
United States would pledge not to invade Cuba. If Stevenson were to
suggest something along this line in the United Nations, Fomin said,
Ambassador Zorin would be interested. After checking with the Presi-
dent, Rusk authorized Scab to indicate America’s interest, and Scab passed
that word to Fomin at 7 : 45 that Friday evening.

At about six o’clock, the famous personal message from Khrushchev
to Kennedy had begun to come in on the teletype from Moscow. Rusk

304 The Kennedy Years

and I met with the President and some of our colleagues in the Oval
Office to try to decipher what Khrushchev was trying to tell us. It was an
extraordinary letter — personal, discursive, and emotional — unquestion-
ably a cri de coeur by Khrushchev and untouched by any banal foreign-
office hand. At the time, I remembered that I had once been told by a
Soviet expert that when Khrushchev composed a letter or message, he
turned his chair toward the wall and dictated in a loud voice to a stenog-
rapher sitting behind him. Reading the letter on that fateful Friday eve-
ning, I could picture the squat, morosely unhappy Chairman facing a
blank wall and a doubtful future. I felt his anguish in every paragraph.

After a long apologia offering Khrushchev’s excuses for putting the
missiles in Cuba and explaining why the United States should not be
concerned about them, he came to the heart of the matter. The Soviets,
he proposed, would withdraw or destroy the missiles now in Cuba and
would send no more, on condition that we stop our blockade and not
invade Cuba. He then acknowledged the dangerous collision course on
which our two nations were headed. “If you have not lost your self-
control and sensibly conceive what this might lead to, then, Mr. Presi-
dent,” he wrote,

we and you ought not to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the
knot of war, because, the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be
tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he
who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to
cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because
you yourself understand perfectly well of what terrible forces our countries dis-
pose. Consequently, if there is no intention to tighten that knot, and thereby to
doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only
relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie
that knot. We are ready for this . 1

Considered against the background of the Scab incident, the Chair-
man’s letter seemed to be the break in the clouds we had been waiting
for, and I slept at home for the first time in several nights. Meanwhile,
experts from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research
settled down to analyze the Khrushchev letter and the Scab message to
determine what, if any, traps they might contain.

For the past ten days I had felt caught up in irresistible forces mov-
ing us toward catastrophe — and I began to think of the hawks among us
almost as enemies. I could not tell Ruth, or anyone else, the details of
what was happening — though I had told her earlier in the week that she
ought to try to turn the basement into a small bomb cellar, since I would
be taken off to a secret command center if hell broke loose. Wishing not
to alarm anyone, she had made meager and almost pathetic prepara-
tions. She moved some canned food into the basement, stored water in

The Cuban Missile Crisis

3 ° 5

large jars, laid in a supply of flashlights, and cached away some books
for herself to read and a Bible for our black cook, who was devoutly
religious.

The Second Message

I hough I was encouraged Friday night that a resolution might be at
hand, hope rapidly dissipated Saturday morning. Just after the ExCom
assembled at ten o’clock, the news ticker reported that a new letter from
Khrushchev was being broadcast by Radio Moscow. Totally different in
tone and substance from the idiosyncratic and highly personal message
of the night before, it had clearly not been written by Khrushchev but
by a committee; it bore the unmistakable marks of an official communi-
cation — an art form with which we were all too familiar. To our dismay,
it changed the terms of the offer by establishing a parallel between the
Soviet missiles in Cuba and our Jupiters in Turkey; as the price for Mos-
cow’s removing its offensive missiles, we must remove the Jupiters.

Why had the terms been changed? Had Khrushchev been overruled,
or had the mention of such a face-saving swap in the Washington press —
particularly in a column by Walter Lippmann — led Khrushchev to believe
that he could safely raise the ante ? To increase our anxiety, John McCone
reported that a single Soviet ship had detached itself from the others
and was headed for Cuba and that work on the missile sites was proceed-
ing day and night. Even more alarming, we were advised that Soviet
SAMs had shot down one of our U-2 reconnaissance planes — the first
fatality of the crisis. Earlier in the week, the ExCom had solemnly decided
that if one U-2 were shot down, we would send our aircraft to take out
a single SAM site and if a second were attacked, we would destroy all the
SAM sites. The more blood-thirsty members of the ExCom were insist-
ing that we act Sunday morning.

Here the President showed the judgment that invested his handling
of the affair with high statesmanship. Refusing to be panicked into a
step that would almost certainly mean escalation, he postponed the
decision for at least another day. But it was unmistakably Black Satur-
day, since in spite of the Khrushchev letter, one might reasonably infer
from the evidence that the Soviets really intended war and were simply
stalling until they were better prepared. What gave a certain irony to
our predicament was that the Jupiters, an early form of liquid-fuel mis-
sile, were obsolete; no one could even be sure they were operable. In a
purely military sense, we did not even need them; Polaris submarines
stationed in or near Turkish waters would be far more effective. Even
Robert Kennedy commented at that Saturday morning meeting that the
Soviet proposal was “not unreasonable.” But the Jupiters were in Turkey
as part of our whole NATO commitment, and the United States could

yo6 The Kennedy Years

not trade off equipment committed by NATO to serve interests of its
own without undercutting the confidence of our Western allies.

The Problem of Withdrawing the Jupiters

The problem was political, not military. Because the missiles, lacking
military value, were clearly a provocation, there was every reason to
withdraw them but it had to be a voluntary act worked out in agreement
with our NATO allies. The President had wanted to withdraw the Jupi-
ters from both Turkey and Italy for some time. But the history of our
efforts to withdraw them has been garbled and, since that distortion
impugns my own record of responsibility, I would like to dispose of a
personally annoying bit of historians’ gossip that implies that the Presi-
dent had ordered me to remove the missiles from I urkey prior to the
missile crisis and that the missiles were still in place at the time of the
crisis only because I had failed to carry out his instructions. I am gratef ul
to Professor Burton J. Bernstein of Stanford University for effectively
refuting that annoying canard. Rather than burdening the text with a
distracting digression, I am including a full clarification in a footnote . 2

After carefully reviewing all evidence available to him, Professor
Bernstein pointed out that “it is too simple to conclude, as have some
analysts, that Kennedy ordered removal of these missiles and that the
bureaucracy thwarted his instructions. Indeed, according to Bundy’s
recent recollection, the President did not order withdrawal of the mis-
siles until after the Cuban Missile Crisis . 3

The Trollope Ploy

The situation on Saturday morning seemed darkly foreboding. I he
blockade, the hawks insisted, had not worked; it had simply allowed the
Soviets time to complete the missile emplacement. When the Joint Chiefs
of Staff joined our meeting, they proposed that we launch an airstrike
Monday, to be followed by an invasion. One or two of my colleagues
seemed, I thought, almost pleased that things had worked out as they
had predicted; they had always regarded the blockade as an illusory
course and feared it might lead us into a trap.

Of all the people in the room, the President was by far the most calm
and analytical. If we launched an airstrike, would the Soviets respond by
an attack on Turkey — which would lead to the Jupiters being fired off?
To avoid such a drastic escalation, he ordered them defused (much to
the disgust of those eager for dramatic action). How supremely fortu-
nate that the President was John F. Kennedy rather than one of my
hawkish colleagues!

Rusk, Llewellyn Thompson, and I drafted a note rejecting the Turk-

The Cuban Missile Crisis 307

ish deal and demanding that the Soviets immediately halt work on the
missiles. When we brought it back to the ExCom, Robert Kennedy
objected both to the content and tenor of the draft. Instead, he proposed
what McGeorge Bundy was later to call the Trollope Ploy — evoking the
image of a Victorian maiden who would construe even the tiniest gesture
as a marriage proposal she could then eagerly accept. Why not, Robert
Kennedy proposed, ignore the second formal note? Why not reply to
Khrushchev’s personal letter as though the second note had not existed?
I like to think that only fatigue and anxiety led me to overlook the art-
istry of the proposal. Of course, Bobby Kennedy was right, but my first
reaction was skeptical.

Robert Kennedy and Sorensen drafted a response that was promptly
dispatched to Khrushchev. Meanwhile, Robert Kennedy delivered a copy
to Ambassador Dobrynin, with a severe warning that the United States
would react strongly unless Khrushchev immediately advised that the
missiles would be withdrawn. In addition, Kennedy suggested to Dob-
rynin privately that the President had wanted to remove the missiles
from Turkey and Italy for a long period, but it could not be part of the
deal, since it was not an arrangement that could be made under threat
or pressure. He had ordered their removal and it was “our judgment
that, within a short time after the crisis was over, those missiles would be
gone.” 4 Dobrynin, however, told Bobby Kennedy that in his opinion the
Kremlin was far too committed to agree to the deal envisaged by the
President’s letter.

1 woke early on Sunday morning with a sense of depression, but it
did not last long. A few minutes before nine o’clock, Radio Moscow
announced it would broadcast an important statement. We knew that if
the Russians gave a negative answer, we were poised to launch an air-
strike no later than Tuesday morning. Even then I doubted if that
schedule would be kept, in view of the President’s manifest desire to
avoid any irrevocable act. But fortunately, we never had to find out.
What the radio relayed was another long, tortured letter from Khru-
shchev that told us what we were eager to hear. In response to President
Kennedy’s promise that there would be no attack or invasion of Cuba,
Khrushchev wrote that he had instructed Soviet officers to discontinue
construction of the missile sites, dismantle them, and return them to the
USSR, and that UN representatives would be permitted to verify the
dismantling. Khrushchev also added that he was sending Vasily Kuzne-
tsov, the First Deputy Foreign Minister to work with U Thant in elimi-
nating the present crisis. The ExCom once more went to work, and we
drafted a quick acceptance statement. I shall never forget the relief we
all felt that morning. Unless something unforeseen happened, the crisis
had passed.

308 The Kennedy Years

Sweeping Up

That did not mean, of course, that we could avoid a long period of
sweeping up. The President appointed John J. McCloy to head the
negotiations with Kuznetsov and designated Deputy Secretary of Defense
Roswell Gilpatric and me to work with him. That, as it turned out, was
not necessary. I had so much catching up to do with work deferred dur-
ing the crisis that I did not have time to go to New York, and McCloy,
with some help from Gilpatric, carried on successfully. In time, we were
satisfied that the missiles had all been removed. A problem developed
over securing removal of the Ilyushin 24s but that, too, was ultimately
worked out.

No doubt part of the delay in cleaning up was due to Castro’s foot-
dragging. The Kremlin was in an awkward spot, and Castro made the
most of it. To persuade the Cubans not to obstruct Soviet actions,
Khrushchev sent Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan to Havana on
November 2. Castro, Mikoyan found, was outraged and intransigent. At
the end of the month, on November 30, Mikoyan came to Washington
for a talk with President Kennedy; that night Ruth and I dined with him
informally at the home of Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. The
only other guests were, as I recall, the President’s Economic Adviser,
Walter Heller, and his wife and Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin and Mrs.
Dobrynin. The Udalls lived modestly in a small house in a wooded area
of McLean, Virginia, and when we arrived the place was surrounded by
a Secret Service army.

It was a strange, seemingly unreal evening. The liquor flowed plen-
tifully, and Mikoyan demonstrated the resourcefulness that had kept
him alive and in power for many years. He was widely famed as the
prototypical “survivor.” Though Mikoyan had been a close associate of
Stalin in the State Defense Committee during the war, Stalin had still
exiled Mikoyan’s younger sons to Siberia; yet Mikoyan remained as Dep-
uty Premier and continued to hold that post under Khrushchev. A
whimsical anecdote then circulating in Moscow related that the Com-
munist government had been overthrown, Khrushchev exiled to Amer-
ica, and the Czar restored to the throne. Many years later, the story
went, Khrushchev telephoned the Czar to petition for the right to return
so he might die in his native land. The Czar replied “Just a minute, let
me consult.” Then over the telephone the Czar was heard asking,
“Anastas, what do you think?”

Now Mikoyan — in the living room of a typical middle-class American
home — regaled us with a straightforward account of Castro’s anger and
rudeness. Castro had refused to see him for two weeks, letting him wait
impatiently in a Cuban resort town; when they finally met, conversation

The Cuban Missile Crisis 309

had been angry and difficult. During the evening he spoke of his wife
who had died the day after he arrived in Cuba. Though they had been
married for many years he had made no effort to return to Moscow for
the funeral. At the beginning, as young revolutionaries, he and his wife
had , so he told us, “lived together only as brother and sister” because
they did not want love-making to deflect their thoughts and energies
from their single revolutionary objective. Later they apparently made
up for lost time since they had five sons, one of whom, a pilot, had been
killed in action in World War II.

It was an odd, and for me somewhat disquieting, evening. Just
recovering from the intense strain of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Ruth and
I found it difficult to join wholeheartedly in the singing and conviviality
that ensued. Mrs. Dobrynin, an aggressive woman and quite sure of her-
self, insisted on becoming the life of the party, hammering American
songs on the piano quite noisily and mechanically and demanding that
everyone sing as loudly as she. Then came many toasts extravagantly
expressing the eternal friendship of our two countries.

Had anyone been alert enough to notice, I would have appeared
especially quiet, if not a little surly. Mikoyan, a wily Armenian, joined
the festivities with apparent gusto, though I felt he was secretly laughing
at what he considered the sentimental, and even gullible, Americans.

Stewart Udall is an admirable man, outgoing and friendly, for whom
I have great affection, and I did not fault him for his manifest decency.
Not having endured the agony of the missile crisis as a direct participant,
he could not share my sense of constraint in socializing with the repre-
sentatives of a country with which we had only narrowly averted a war.

Retrospective

How, finally, should one assess the missile crisis? It was almost cer-
tainly a watershed in our relations with the Soviet Union. By bringing
Moscow face to face with the reality of nuclear catastrophe, it paved the
way for detente. At the same time, it no doubt helped stimulate the Soviets’
subsequent buildup of both strategic and conventional weapons. Never
again would the Soviets knowingly permit themselves to be caught at a
tactical disadvantage requiring a humiliating retreat.

Whatever the views of the academic second-guessers as to how the
affair should have been handled — and they have not been reticent — I
thought then, and still do, that under John Kennedy’s firm leadership
we gave a superior performance. We did not move precipitately but
argued out all available courses of action in an intellectual interchange
that was the most objective I ever witnessed in government — or, for that
matter, in the private sector. Surviving ExCom members look back on it

3 io The Kennedy Years

with pride. We were present at a moment of high challenge and, with
John Kennedy’s steady but cautious guidance, we won the day without a
shot being fired.

II. Day of the Murder

In the early evening of Wednesday, November 20, 1963, I
returned from Paris where I had been attending a ministerial meeting
of the OEEC. As soon as I reached the State Department at 9:20 p.m. I
called the President. We talked principally about our problems with the
European Common Market — primarily with France and the European
Community’s common agricultural policy. I told him that Chancellor
Ludwig Erhard had given me the impression that the Germans under-
stood the difficulties Europe’s policies were creating for the American
farmers and that he wanted to be helpful. We also discussed the pending
wheat negotiations with the Soviet Union and a New York Times story of
the previous day, which the President feared might be read as implying
that he was contemplating a trade offensive against the Soviet Union.
Finally, I reported on a talk I had just had with ex-Chancellor Adenauer
and on the pending Mundt bill, on which I planned to testify the next
day.

Kennedy seemed in a relaxed mood. He said he would return from
Texas Saturday evening and would lunch with Cabot Lodge on Sunday.
He thought that he and I should have a visit Sunday evening. Either we
could meet at the White House or I could come down to Middleburg
Sunday afternoon to brief him for his meeting with Erhard on Monday.
Among other things he wanted to show me his new house. It was our
last conversation.

Almost every American who was of sentient age on Friday, November
22, 1963, remembers where he or she was and what was happening when
word came of the President’s assassination. The private reactions of mil-
lions of Americans were imprinted indelibly on their memories. For me
it was a day of anguish and anxiety. Secretary Rusk had left that morn-
ing with most other members of the United States cabinet to attend a
joint cabinet meeting with the Japanese in Tokyo, so I was Acting Sec-
retary. The morning had followed a routine course. I had held a staff
meeting, met with several of my colleagues, and had lunch in my office
with McGeorge Bundy, who had to leave early to meet with Secretary
McNamara. Then, at approximately 1:40 p.m., a messenger handed me
a bit of yellow paper torn off a ticker with a UPI flash; three shots had

Day of the Murder yn

been fired at the President’s motorcade. Almost immediately it was con-
firmed that the President had been shot in the head.

Within no more than ten minutes Secretary Rusk telephoned from
his Tokyo-bound plane, then thirty thousand feet in the air the other
side of Hickam Field, Hawaii. He had already heard the news and I
could give him little amplification. “We’ll be back at Hickam Field in
forty-five minutes. Shall we come to Washington or go straight to Dal-
las?” I told him I did not know but would find out. “I’ll call again from
Hickam Field,’ Rusk replied. Within half an hour we knew the President
was dead.

What had happened? Was it a plot? The beginning of a Soviet move?
The first step in a coup attempt? I telephoned John McCone, the head
of the CIA, and suggested that he activate the Watch Committee, which
monitored crises and interpreted every fragment of news from all over
the world, tapping foreign intelligence services and assembling every
source of information available. He had, he said, already done so.

While watching the television screen in my office for news, I dis-
cussed with George Springsteen, my top staff assistant, and others on
my immediate staff what to do first. When word came that Lee Harvey
Oswald had been captured, I immediately ordered his name checked in
the Department’s files for any information that might cast light on his
activities. Within minutes, word came back that he had spent thirty-two
months in the Soviet Union as recently as June 1962.

In the minutes that passed, my staff tapped every available resource
of the State Department to develop an agenda for action. Obviously there
were many things an experienced foreign office automatically did:
reassure the diplomatic corps and send messages to our embassies, try
to assess the reactions of various countries and head off precipitate spec-
ulation. But beyond that, I discovered duties of the State Department I
only dimly recalled from early American history studies. The Act of
Congress of September 15, 1789, which had created the Department of
State, had not only invested the new department with the responsibilities
of what had been known as the Department of Foreign Affairs but had
also assigned it certain special responsibilities originally conducted by
the Secretary of the Continental Congress. These extra duties were the
product of a compromise; some members of Congress had been advo-
cating that they be given to a new Home Department. Among the
domestic assignments entrusted to the Department were the custody of
the Great Seal and responsibility for publishing the laws enacted by Con-
gress. In addition, there were some special tasks to be performed on the
occasion of a President’s death.

The Secretary of State was required, among other things, to send
messages to the governors of our states and territories, informing them

3/2 The Kennedy Years

of orders for the thirty-day public mourning period and supplying details
of the funeral service; he also had to request notification whether they
intended to be present at the funeral ceremonies, to issue instructions
closing all executive department agencies on the day of the funeral, and
to direct the Secretary of Defense that all military commands and vessels
under the control of the Secretary of Defense should fly flags at half-
mast for a thirty-day period of mourning. He had to notify all foreign
embassies that the President had died and inform them that the new
President had taken the oath of office.

I gathered two or three of the most skillful writers in the Depart-
ment, including Harlan Cleveland and Walt Rostow, and together we
began drafting the necessary proclamations and messages. Included
among them was a Presidential proclamation appointing the day of Pres-
ident Kennedy’s funeral as a day of national mourning and prayer.

By the time the Secret Service inquired through channels as to
whether the State Department had a dossier on Lee Harvey Oswald, we
had already discovered that he had not only been in Moscow but had
also applied for Soviet citizenship. What was the connection? I called in
Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson and Averell Harriman — both of whom
had served in Moscow. “Could this,” I asked, “be a Soviet move to be
followed up by a missile attack?’’ The answer was a resounding negative.
The leaders of the Soviet Union, they insisted, would never sanction the
assassination of other heads of state, as that might invite similar attacks
on themselves. Nevertheless, there was the danger that Oswald’s pre-
tense to Marxist convictions might set off violent anti-Soviet sentiments
that could undo all our efforts to develop working arrangements with
Moscow.

Two or three times during the afternoon I talked with McGeorge
Bundy in his White House office. Once he said to me poignantly, “It’s
lonely over here.” Meanwhile, we awaited the arrival of the airplane car-
rying the body of President Kennedy and the new President, Lyndon
Johnson. I went to the White House to find old friends in tears, includ-
ing Arthur Schlesinger, who said, “They’ve killed him,” without being
very specific as to just who “they” might be.

Helicopters were leaving from the White House lawn for Andrews
Field, and I climbed aboard carrying a memorandum for the new Pres-
ident listing the routine tasks he must immediately perform. The MATS
terminal at Andrews Field was surrounded by Secret Service men,
marines, and a growing crow d of excited people. I had some coffee in
the mess and waited. Soon the big plane came in, and a fork-lift removed
the heavy casket. Mrs. Kennedy emerged and departed with the casket
for Bethesda Naval Hospital. Finally, the new 7 President came down the
ramp. Lyndon Johnson moved directly to a cluster of microphones and
made a little speech, which we could only indistinctly hear, except that

Day of the Murder 3 13

the words, “I will do my best. That is all I can do,” came through loud
and clear. Since the President had sent word that McNamara, Mac Bundy,
and “someone from the State Department” were to accompany him to
the White House, the three of us followed him to the waiting helicopter.
I handed the President my memorandum describing the formal tasks
that had to be performed and a draft of a proclamation. Bob McNamara
asked me, as Acting Secretary of State, to sit opposite the President, but
I insisted that he take the seat. Mrs. Johnson moved across to a couch
between Mac Bundy and myself.

President Johnson seemed near a state of shock. He moved errati-
cally, and I saw twitches in his face. During the ten-minute ride from
Andrews Field to the White House he spoke to the three of us with deep
emotion. Mrs. Kennedy, he said, had been incredibly brave. Although
her stockings were covered with blood, she refused to change them —
since it was her husband’s blood — even as she stood by Johnson during
the swearing-in. He then turned to us and said, “You’re men I trust the
most. You must stay with me. I’ll need you. President Kennedy gathered
about him extraordinary people I could never have reached for. You’re
the ablest men I’ve ever seen. It’s not just that you’re President Ken-
nedy’s friends, but you are the best anywhere and you must stay. I want
you to stand with me." He then asked each of us to tell him what we had
done during the day and what needed to be done immediately. Mac
Bundy and Bob McNamara spoke briefly, and I dwelt largely on the
effect of the assassination on foreign governments and what we must do
to reassure them.

When we landed on the White House lawn, a few yards from the
Oval Office, where all of us had landed with President Kennedy on so
many previous occasions, everything seemed to have a different, sad,
almost macabre appearance. The President headed for the West Wing,
where he was meeting with the Congressional leadership. Bob McNa-
mara and I entered through the Cabinet Room and sat together for the
next twenty minutes talking of the meaning of everything that had
occurred in the last few hours, as well as the significance of the Kennedy
Presidency. We agreed how unfortunate it had been that JFK had felt
his freedom of action limited because he had been elected by such a
narrow margin. With a new election and a new mandate in 1964, we had
hoped he could operate with less restraint. It could have been a brilliant,
innovative period for America.

Later that night, I went back to Andrews Field. A half-hour after
midnight, on November 23, the plane carrying most of the Johnson
Administration cabinet taxied up to the MATS terminal. Dean Rusk, as
the senior member of the cabinet, disembarked first. He made a state-
ment on behalf of his colleagues, addressing those “who had the honor
of serving President Kennedy” and who “value the gallantry and wisdom

The Kennedy Years

he brought to the grave, awesome, and lonely office of the Presidency.”

I seized Dean Rusk’s arm and rushed him off to a limousine so we
could talk about what had to be done as well as the meaning of what had
occurred that day. No one could yet be sure that Oswald had acted on
his own; there was still a chance of a larger plot. Among other things,
we spoke of the dangers of a mindless reaction on the part of extremist
groups within the United States. Pat Moynihan, whom I had seen in the
MATS mess, was particularly concerned that the Dallas police might
behave irresponsibly. He knew the police mentality, and he was eager
for us to do something to prevent unnecessary reaction.

The next day, we faced many routine chores. Working with Averell
Harriman and Alexis Johnson, I drafted a brief speech for the nation,
which the President decided not to make, and I talked with the President
and Mac Bundy about which foreign visitors the President should per-
sonally see from among the large number arriving that evening. We also
discussed at length the kind of reception that would be held after the
funeral.

That night, Dean Rusk, Averell Harriman, and I went to Dulles Air-
port. Unique among American airports, planes land far out on the tar-
mac, and passengers are ferried to the airport terminal by mobile lounges
that connect directly with the planes. Then the lounges kneel down to
ground level like giant elephants, debouching the passengers through a
corridor directly into the terminal. In view of the large number of for-
eign heads of state and chiefs of government coming in their own pri-
vate planes, no one of us could handle the task of greeting each man.
To the extent possible, Secretary Rusk met the principal heads of state,
while I met most of the others. As might be expected, de Gaulle’s arrival
attracted the greatest attention.

The next day, Rusk and I worried over the possibility that one or
more heads of state might be attacked by an assassin. The funeral party
was scheduled to walk eight long blocks between the White House and
St. Matthew’s Cathedral through a densely populated section of the city.
De Gaulle, with his great height, would be the most conspicuous target,
and, as Dean Rusk noted to me, he had already been the object of four
assassination attempts. A bullet striking Mikoyan could create a crisis
between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Alone among the top officials of the government, I declined to go to
the funeral. I had two motives. One was a personal one: I have a distaste
for the pomp and panoply of state funerals; we were treating the dead
President as a king, rather than as a warm, human, lively, glittering young
American elected by the popular vote of a great nation. I could, how-
ever, have set aside my personal predilections, but I felt it imperative
that a responsible official remain at the center of communications, ready
to deal with an emergency, such as an assassination attempt. As Alexis

Day of the Murder 315

Johnson and I sat in my office watching the slow procession on tele-
vision, we felt an oppressive apprehension. God knew what the future
would hold! But no disasters occurred.

That evening 220 guests came to the reception rooms on the top
floor of the State Department, where Rusk and I, and our colleagues
tried to make them feel welcome, be certain that no one was slighted,
and make sure that the new President was briefed a moment in advance
before he received each distinguished visitor. Sixteen of the guests were
accorded such special treatment. The President seated them for a few
moments for private conversation, but he was uncharacteristically laconic;
he knew few of his guests and let Dean Rusk do the talking.

I devoted most of the following day, November 26, to helping the
President receive foreign visitors — Emperor Haile Selassie in the morn-
ing, then Prince Philip and Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home, and, at
noon, Chancellor Erhard. 1 hursday was Thanksgiving. On Friday, at
his insistence, I took Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Zulhkar Ali Bhutto to
see the President. Relations with Pakistan were still extremely sticky, and
Bhutto had persistently undercut us. Thus, though Bhutto had intended
the visit as a means of ingratiating himself with the new President, I took
the occasion to interject some critical comments. The President — whom
I had briefed in advance — picked up and elaborated on my comments,
giving Bhutto an uncomfortable time. As he and I walked out of the
President’s office together, he turned on me furiously: “How dare you
treat me like this? Don’t you know I spent fifty thousand dollars for an
airplane to fly over here and I didn’t expect such a discourteous recep-
tion?”

The comment did not disturb me, since Bhutto had earned the dip-
lomatic chastising he had just received. Yet, I thought of the incident
years later when Bhutto was brutally confined in a small prison for many
months and finally hanged. Two men I have known, former Prime Min-
ister Bhutto and Adnan Menderes of Turkey, have been executed by
hanging; a third, whom I regarded as a good friend, former Prime Min-
ister Amir Abbas Hoveida of Iran, was killed by a firing squad. Sic transit.

None of us could see the future clearly. Most of us had joined the
government when John F. Kennedy was inaugurated. We had worked
together closely and harmoniously for almost three years. Now suddenly
the climate had drastically changed. I he bright promise offered by the
young President had suddenly darkened. We felt chilled and apprehen-
sive.

Few of us were well-acquainted with our new leader. As Vice-Presi-
dent, he had been an unhappy, brooding, sometimes irascible man; one
had dealt with him carefully but given him only secondary attention.
Nothing a Vice-President did was important, yet no one wanted to cross
Lyndon Johnson for fear of an eruption. How many of us would stay

j/6 The Kennedy Years

once we had tested the new leader and he had tested us? No one could
say. Some had been so closely identified with JFK as to make an adjust-
ment difficult both for them and for Lyndon Johnson. Certainly, a large
component of the top command recruited from Harvard and MIT would
be likely to find the new atmosphere less congenial. Could they happily
function under a Texan who had made his way by slicing through the
political sagebrush with a machete and was burdened by the baggage of
regional attitudes and prejudices?

I was by no means sure of my own plans. Though I knew the Vice-
President officially — and we had been on friendly terms — I had had no
personal relations with him. During my Stevenson years, I had looked
on him as a political primitive — tough, effective, yet hardly exuding the
liberal democratic values to which I felt committed. Now I could do
nothing but watch and wait.

PART VI

The Johnson
Years

22 . Sailing under a New Skipper

President Kennedy was dead. He had been my friend and
then my chief and the shape of the future was now obscure. I thought I
had understood Kennedy. He resembled other men I knew well who
had gone to good schools, were informed, literate with a wry wit, and
had a receptive ear for historical or literary allusions. His being Presi-
dent necessarily imposed a slight barrier between us, but he was friendly
and outgoing, and we could talk with the easy assurance that friends
enjoy together.

Rapport with Lyndon Johnson did not come so easily. He was of a
breed I had known only from literature, legend, or at a distance. As a
Stevenson Democrat, I had shared the prevailing stereotype of LBJ as a
shrewd political manipulator — an “operator” ready to make a deal even
by compromising policies in which I strongly believed. I did not think of
him as a “liberal,” which for many of us was still the shibboleth of
acceptability, but as a Texan and a southerner — with the qualities those
two words connoted in the stilted vocabulary of our parochial politics.

I assumed I would never understand Johnson as I had John Ken-
nedy, for he was, as I saw it, a man from a different culture. Lacking the
tone and manners one expected of a President — with a breezy Texan
tendency to oversimplify and overstate, overpraise and overblame — he
would not, I thought, be easy to work with. That I would never fully
comprehend him was correct, since he was far more complex than Ken-
nedy and, as I came to perceive him, capable of strengths he did not
visibly display and weaknesses he could not effectively conceal. I look
back on Lyndon Johnson as both imposing and enigmatic, with abilities
as impressive as his imperfections.

Prior to the time he took his oath of office on Air Force One in Dal-

yi8 The Johnson Years

las, I had had only a few encounters with him, including one momentar-
ily abrasive. Hypersensitively fearful that someone might take him for
granted — a concern built into the office of Vice-President — he had at
one point protested angrily at what he regarded as my inadequate
response to some request (I do not remember what). But when I wrote
him a detailed explanation, he seemed completely mollified and apolo-
getic; indeed, he gave me the ultimate accolade — I was, he told me, a
“can-do man.”

Building a relation of mutual confidence required, among other
things, that I be ready to devote more time than I could comfortably
spare to listening to his anecdotes and reminiscences. Indulging the
occupational habit acquired by politicians from years of bavardage, he
loved to sit back in his chair and tell long, colorful, Texas stories, or talk
about past experiences — often with little relevance to the subject at hand.
Though I tried to avoid it, he would sometimes catch me after meetings
around the cabinet table and lead me into a tiny room just off the Oval
Office that he used as a kind of hideaway. Then, after a long conversa-
tion — or more accurately, a soliloquy — he might suggest that I go swim-
ming with him in the White House pool. I unfailingly declined, not only
because I swim badly but because I was always hard-pressed for time.
The fact that I might have a foreign ambassador waiting in my office
seemed of little concern to Lyndon Johnson, and 1 felt foolish saying,
“Mr. President, I just can’t do it, I’ve got meetings and problems I must
take care of this afternoon” — which seemed to imply that I was busy
while the President was not.

The Vision of LBJ

In time, I gained fuller appreciation — to the point of admiration —
for his capacities and qualities. For all of his disarming simplicity of man-
ner, he was a remarkably effective man with extraordinary shrewdness,
phenomenal driving force, and an implacable will. He could sometimes
be harsh and obdurate, relying more on cunning than subtlety, but he
was always kind to me, and in time we developed an affectionate rap-
port.

Yet in the beginning there was an inevitable sense of constraint.
Though Lyndon Johnson tried, so far as possible, to create the appear-
ance of continuity with the Kennedy Administration, the atmosphere
perceptibly changed. As the months wore on, the imprimatur of LBJ
was stamped on almost everything we did — and on our method of doing
it. From the first weeks of his Administration, he concentrated intensely
on two almost obsessive objectives: the first was to break loose Kennedy’s
legislative measures then jammed in the Congressional machinery; the
second was to bring into being the so-called Great Society, which repre-

Sailing under a New Skipper 3/9

sented the essence of all he had dreamed about and worked for during
his long career. It is easy to be cynical about many of Lyndon Johnson’s
attitudes and activities; what the public saw was an earthy man with little
skill at concealing often crass political motives and methods. But an
equally authentic picture was of a man possessed by a vision and the
desire to realize it: the vision of his country freed from poverty and
discrimination in which everyone would have an equal chance for an
education and a decent living. He really believed in it!

Often, after long and sometimes heated arguments about the all-
absorbing mess in Vietnam, he would lean back in his chair at the cabinet
table, or lean over to me when we were sitting together in that tiny room
by the Oval Office he used for tete-a-tetes and expound rhapsodically on
the subject dearest to his heart. Then I could feel his overwhelming
ambition for his country — an ambition, banal in its exposition yet clearly
recognizable as the deeply felt drive of a strong, resourceful leader who
concealed under his inurbane exterior a compelling idealism. In part,
he was, I suppose, responding to a populism derived from the soil from
which he sprang. But, at the same time, he was speaking the words of
one who had always felt himself an outsider. He was constantly aware —
particularly in the presence of his sophisticated, elegantly educated
advisers — that he had acquired his education, such as it was, from the
Southwest State Teachers College.

Yet much of his strength lay in his individuality and in the fact that
his manners and expressions had not been honed by the debilitating
polish of a more self-conscious environment. His speech gained force as
an instrument of persuasion by the vividness of his metaphors, since,
like all men of elemental eloquence, he spoke in images. He had, he
would say, been as busy as a man with one hoe and two rattlesnakes. Or
he might describe someone at a meeting as making as much noise as a
crazy mule in a tin barn, or dismiss a man with the ultimate language of
mistrust: “I’d never go to a water hole with him!” When we were heading
into the harsher days of Vietnam his constant advice was that we should
“hunker down like a jackass in a rainstorm.” He had an endless reper-
tory of anecdotes about Johnson City, Texas, which — discounting the
element of epic accumulation at the hands of LBJ — appeared to have
been populated by a remarkable collection of authentic American eccen-
trics. Some of the tales he told over and over were familiar to me from
boyhood days, including the touching saga of an old German named
Schmidt who was renowned far and wide for his bad humor. Though
he had never before been known to smile, Schmidt one day broke into
triumphant laughter. Why the unexpected mirth? “Well,” he said, “I just
found that old Ziegler’s been payin’ my wife five dollars a night to sleep
with her and I can sleep with her for nothin’.” Lyndon Johnson always
had respect for a favorable deal.

J20 The Johnson Years

Not only was Lyndon Johnson’s language colorful, it was scatologi-
cal — a habit he shared with John F. Kennedy. That sometimes created a
slight problem, since I had inherited a long-established State Depart-
ment practice of having a secretary take down all telephone conversa-
tions. It was a practice well understood throughout the government and
eminently useful. During the course of a long conversation, I might make
three or four promises: letters I would write, telephone calls I would
make, memoranda I would prepare, or instructions I would give my
staff. In view of the intense pace of my schedule, I had no time after
completing a phone conversation to call my appropriate assistants and
debrief them. Instead, I could immediately turn to my next appoint-
ment, confident that my conversation would be automatically tran-
scribed and that my chief of staff, George Springsteen, would promptly
make sure that my promises were kept. The only problem was that the
secretaries who took down my conversations were gently brought up.
Thus, conversations with either Presidents Kennedy or Johnson tended
to be spotted with asterisks. Fortunately, the girls were not only well-
bred, they were also precise; because they included the exact number of
asterisks, translation required little imagination.

As a good politician, Johnson thought more in terms of people than
ideas and he enjoyed gossip about people. Sometimes he would press me
for comments on my colleagues, which I always tried to pass off as blandly
as possible. He was neither inhibited nor charitable in his evaluation of
his closest associates. One story will illustrate his attitude. He said to me
one day, apropos of nothing at all, “George, you know John Connally
pretty well, don’t you?’’ “Not well, but I know him,’’ I said. “After all,
you sent him down to work with us in the Lend-Lease Administration
during the war, and of course we saw one another when he was Secre-
tary of the Navy in Kennedy’s day.” “Well,” he said, “that John’s an
interesting fellow. He’s got a lot goin’ for him.” Then he paused for a
moment and continued, “You know, he’ll go far. He’ll go almost to the
top. He’d go to the top but he lacks one thing and that could destroy
him someday. He’s sure as hell impressive. He can walk into a room and
everybody knows he’s there. He knows how to press the flesh and where
the bodies are buried. He’s a good politician.” Then, shaking his head
sadly, he repeated, “It’s too bad he lacks just one thing.”

“What’s that?” I asked, but he was not ready yet to lose the effect.

“He’s an awful quick study; you give him a memo or a brief and he
can get right up and make a powerful speech about it. Sometimes he can
be real eloquent. Too bad he lacks just one thing or he could go clear to
the top.” Again I asked what he meant, and this time he replied. “John
Connally doesn’t have even the tiniest trace of compassion; he can leave
more dead bodies in the field with less remorse than any politician I ever
knew, and that’ll keep him from the top.”

Sailing under a New Skipper 321

Another pause for effect, while his voice took on a sharp edge, “You
know, I can use raw power” — drawing the words out harshly and mak-
ing a tight fist — “I can use raw power as well as anyone. You’ve seen me
do it, George. But the difference between John and me is that he loves
it. I hate it!”

Perhaps he’s right about Connally, I thought — although I didn’t really
know him well — but, as for LBJ hating to use raw power — on that point,
I had grave doubts.

The War with the Press

One trait Kennedy and Johnson had in common and which, I sus-
pect, all modern Presidents inevitably share, was an almost pathological
resentment at leaks and press criticism. Kennedy had displayed that
resentment early in his Administration by stopping White House sub-
scriptions to the New York Herald Tribune, with the implication that it
would be disloyal for anyone in the top reaches of government to read
a publication so antagonistic to his policies. But that kind of petty gesture
was out of character, and when he realized it was making him look ridic-
ulous and juvenile the subscriptions were reinstated. Nevertheless, Ken-
nedy never stopped complaining about the unfairness of the press and
the inability of the bureaucracy to keep secrets.

Whenever a leak involved some speculation, discussion, or decision
affecting foreign policy, President Kennedy would automatically blame
it on the State Department, though we knew one junior White House
minion who spouted like a fountain and we suspected that, in at least
some cases, the leak came from the President himself. We were fond of
repeating the hackneyed aphorism that ‘‘the United States government
is the only vessel that leaks at the top,” and we sometimes speculated that
the intemperance of the President’s denunciation of the State Depart-
ment may have been a subconscious mechanism for excusing a nagging
sense of culpability that he might have talked a little too freely.

If in their expressed concern over leaks, Johnson and Kennedy
reacted with similar high-decibel shrieks, Johnson pushed the marker a
little higher by frequently demanding that we bring in the FBI to inves-
tigate the source of some newspaper story so we could fire the culprit . 1
Here, President Johnson’s odd and almost sinister relations with J. Edgar
Hoover came into play. Suspicious, and sometimes vindictive, Johnson
was fascinated at the thought of having at his command a man and an
institution that knew so much about so many and he relished Hoover’s
assiduous tale bearing. Some of Hoover’s stories and innuendoes were
outrageous — including pornographic gossip about other heads of state
and chiefs of government. I hated those preposterous canards, since they
tended to influence the President’s attitudes to the point of distorting

•J22 The Johnson Years

policy. Once, after a particularly upsetting leak, the President arranged
for Hoover to visit me and advise how we could tighten security in the
State Department. As I expected, his counsel was totally fatuous. He
indulged in a rambling and seemingly endless monologue so inconse-
quential and boring that I finally excused myself to take a pretended
telephone call in my conference room, then ducked out the back way,
instructing my office to apologize to Hoover and explain that I had been
called away on an emergency.

The Recurrence of Congo Troubles

Early in the Johnson Administration I again became involved with
the Congo — to which I had devoted so much time during the earlier
Kennedy period. Responding to the strange convolutions of African pol-
itics, Moise Tshombe, the arch secessionist who had tried to lead Katanga
away from the central government, now reversed course. Returning to
Leopoldville from self-imposed exile in Spain at the request of President
Kasavubu, he formed a provisional government of “national unity" on
July 5, 1964. Unity was, however, more a hope than a reality. Rebel
movements increased in violence throughout the Republic, and partic-
ularly in the eastern provinces around Stanleyville, freed by the with-
drawal of the United Nations Security Mission to maneuver as they
wished, Tshombe and Mobutu, who headed the army, increased their
demands for help and openly recruited white mercenaries to try to put
down the swelling insurrections.

The mixed bag of rebels included rural organizers, conspirators
exploiting local discontent, and finally a group of Gizenga’s former
associates in and about Stanleyville who had fled to Communist Brazza-
ville across the river. There in October 1963, they had formed a National
Liberation Committee headed by Christophe Gbenye. I heir insurrec-
tionary efforts were assisted by both Moscow and Peking, because, in the
Chinese ideological view, they were fighting “a war of national libera-
tion.” Besides, had Mao not said ‘‘if we can take the Congo, we can hold
the whole of Africa”? 2

Throughout the summer of 1963, I had watched the Congo with
increasing uneasiness and had kept closely in touch with Belgium’s For-
eign Minister, Paul Henri Spaak. The rebel activities were, it appeared,
expanding to the point where the Congo national army could no longer
contain them. There were mounting threats to American nationals in
the area — particularly missionaries, who were perennial headaches
because they so often refused to leave an area when warned of danger.
The danger increased enormously on August 4, 1964* when the rebels
captured Stanleyville. Sentiment quickly built within the State Depart-
ment for a rescue operation, particularly following many reports of

Sailing under a New Skipper 323

butchery and brutality by the rebel Simba (“Lion” in Swahili) warriors.
During the course of the rebellion they are said to have executed at least
twenty thousand “intellectuals,” “counter-revolutionaries,” and “Ameri-
can agents. 3 I hese reports were embellished with gory details of the
ritual disembowelment of living persons and the cannibalistic practice of
eating their hearts, livers, and genitals while still warm. The fact that the
Simbas responded largely to witchcraft and sorcery gave a Conradian
edge of lunacy to the whole nightmare interlude — particularly because
the Congolese Army demanded equal magic protection.

I hough the Congolese themselves suffered the most from the con-
flict , 4 we were confronted, on the fall of Stanleyville, with the searing
statistic that three thousand foreign residents of nineteen countries were
now held hostage by the rebel Simbas and that the responsible rebel lead-
ers were rapidly departing from Stanleyville. Among the hostages were
a small number of American missionaries along with the United States
consulate staff in Stanleyville, including the American Consul General,
Michael Hoyt, and the Vice Consul, David Grinwis. Through the Inter-
national Red Cross and the Organization of African Unity, we tried by
diplomatic palaver to secure the return of the hostages, but the rebels
insolently retorted that they would release them only when America had
forced the central government in Leopoldville to stop trying to put down
the insurrection. Since no compromise seemed possible, the Congolese
Army, led by white mercenaries, started a column down the road to
recapture Stanleyville.

I found this a dismal period. The rebels were constantly broadcast-
ing that we must halt the column or our own people in Stanleyville would
be murdered. Visions of a mass slaughter haunted me day and night like
a cauchemar that grew worse on awakening. Here, as in the later case of
our sailors on the De Soto Patrols in Vietnam, I felt personal responsi-
bility for the lives of identifiable human beings. Though I argued with
Secretary McNamara that we should try to impose some restraint on the
advancing columns — particularly on their strafing of towns, which seemed
most likely to trigger a massacre — he was resolute and undeterred.

During this period, my old friend William Atwood, then our ambas-
sador in Kenya, was negotiating with President Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya,
then chairman of the Congo Committee of the Organization of African
Unity (OAU), to develop contingency plans for an air drop to rescue the
hostages, while we in Washington worked with Brussels (and particularly
Foreign Minister Spaak) to coordinate the effort. I had the task of per-
suading President Johnson to let us use American planes for the opera-
tion (code-named Dragon Rouge), although the paratroopers would be
Belgian. On November 21, he authorized me to move twelve C-130S up
to Kamina, only four hours away from Stanleyville. Since we wanted to
synchronize the air drop with the arrival of the advancing columns, we

324 The Johnson Years

decided on November 22 to hold up the drop for one more day to per-
mit the column of 600 to arrive immediately after the paratroops had
landed. It was twenty-four hours of agony heightened by press leaks in
London that our planes were on the way. Finally, on November 24, 1964,
our twelve US C-130S and 545 Belgian paratroops arrived over Stanley-
ville at first light (six in the morning), when the Simbas were still groggy.
Ten C-130S commenced the airdrop, followed by the landing of planes
carrying jeeps and supplies and equipped to evacuate the hostages.

The operation, conducted with superb efficiency, lasted five days.
On the Monday night before it started, Dean Rusk and I arrived in din-
ner jackets at the Operations Center of the State Department coming
directly from an embassy dinner for the German Foreign Minister. Dur-
ing the next few nights I slept in the State Department, awakened
periodically as word trickled in on the progress of the operation. As I
had been responsible for persuading the President to let us proceed, I
was emotionally involved in its success; I had met the families of some
of the American hostages and I could think of them as identifiable indi-
viduals whose lives depended on the outcome. If the operation had
resulted in a mass killing, I would have always felt haunted: could I have
avoided it? Fortunately, we saved more than two thousand foreigners in
the Stanleyville and Paulis areas, although another one thousand
remained in the remote bush — principally missionaries who refused to
be rescued. But we did not save everyone. Almost three hundred white
hostages (including about one hundred women and children whom the
rebels were holding in the Victoria Hotel) were killed by bullets or spears,
including two Americans, one of whom was Dr. Paul Carlson and the
other, a female missionary. Carlson, a brave medical missionary, had
long been on our minds, since he had been falsely charged by Gbenye
with being an American spy. I had particularly wanted to save his life.
Later we learned that George Clay, an NBC correspondent, had also
been killed.

Two days later the Belgians pressed us to launch another airdrop
240 miles from Stanleyville, near Paulis, which was being used as a col-
lection point for 450 hostages including seven American missionaries.
The operation would have to be conducted without benefit of an
advancing column. Though Vance, McCone, Rusk, and General Wheeler
favored the enterprise, I had great trouble in getting the President to go
along. He did not, he told me, want to “get tied in on the Congo and
have another Korea or another Vietnam just because of somebody wan-
dering around searching for Jesus Christ.” “We made a mistake,” he said,
‘‘first of all by running the Belgians out and taking the position we did
on Tshombe and then embracing him so as to wrap the colonialist flag
around us and, by acting unilaterally, have become labeled as aggres-
sive.” He resented America’s having to provide transport. “Why won’t

Sailing under a New Skipper 525

the British or French send their planes?” He was not going to risk another
disaster just when we already had so much on our plate. Yet, after
exhausting his objections, he let us go ahead on Thursday (Thanksgiv-
ing Day) with ‘‘Dragon Noir,” using a much smaller force — only seven
planes and 256 men. For some poor unfortunates, however, the rescue
attempt came too late: during the Stanleyville operation, the Simbas in
Paulis had heard Gbenye’s radio broadcast ordering the massacre of all
hostages and had murdered twenty-two of their white captives.

Even after the two airdrops were completed, Algeria and Egypt con-
tinued to airlift large amounts of Soviet, Chinese, and Czechoslovakian
arms to the Simbas. However, the insurrection soon began to fall apart,
particularly after February 4, 1965, when the chief rebel witch doctor,
Mama Onema, was captured and announced that his insurgent clients
were running out of magic.

Many years later, during the 444 days that American hostages were
held in Teheran, my thoughts kept returning to this incident. Although
nothing seemed more ill-conceived and unrealistic than the attempted
rescue mission on April 24, 1980, which left the skeletons of four heli-
copters and the bodies of eight Americans in the Iranian desert, I could
still understand the sense of frustration and desperation that led to its
launching.

Troubles in the Turbulent Caribbean

Although no crisis in the Johnson Administration carried us to the
edge of world catastrophe as had the Cuban Missile Crisis, we still
endured periods of tension and excitement. Against the background of
a constantly escalating war in Vietnam, our attention was deflected by
events in the Caribbean. The first flare-up occurred in Panama, only six
weeks after President Johnson’s inauguration. Though it did not last
long, it briefly consumed our whole attention. I was never surprised that
the people of Panama deeply resented the Americans who occupied the
Canal Zone. Americans lived there on a scale of affluence contrasting
shockingly with that of the Panamanians just over the fence and across
the road. I had been acutely aware of this resentment since the Kennedy
Administration; for, during my interlude as Under Secretary of State
for Economic Affairs, I had been an ex officio member of the board of
directors of the Panama Canal Company and in 1961 had attended a
directors meeting in the Zone. Appalled by the shameless arrogance that
prevailed in this last remaining outpost of American colonialism, I
thought it only a matter of months before this small, smoldering volcano
would erupt. We could not evade much longer the revision of our whole
set of treaty relations with the Panamanians; the existing treaty structure
was not merely an anachronism but founded on a maneuver in 1903

326 The Johnson Years

that verged on the fraudulent. Unhappily, a small but vocal clique in
Congress felt sacredly anointed to preserve the privileged position of the
Zone residents and violently waved the flag at any intrusion of equality
or realism.

Eighteen months later, in September 1962, I was asked by the
Department of Defense to dedicate the first high-level bridge across the
Canal. Ruth and I flew to Panama on October 1 1 for the dedication to
be held at 9:30 Friday morning. I had been told that the Panamanians
were unhappy, for Congress had foolishly insisted on christening the
historic span the Thatcher Ferry Bridge. Who, I asked, was Thatcher?
He was, I learned, an old man of ninety who had headed the Canal’s
Department of Civil Administration from 1910 to 1913. The bridge, the
Panamanians quite reasonably insisted, should have been named “The
Bridge of the Americas,’’ since it linked the two continents; to name it
for a relic of a painful season of American imperialism was an insult. I
agreed that the Congress had been guilty of a diplomatic betise, but no
one had briefed me on the intensity of feeling our thoughtlessness had
generated.

I he next morning, at the appropriate hour, we drove to the bridge
in an atmosphere of mounting tension. The band was playing the tradi-
tional tunes, but the music was not soothing anyone’s savage breast.
Moving to my allotted task, I boldly began my speech, but had not fin-
ished even the first paragraph when I glanced up to see a seemingly
endless mob emerging over the hill just ahead of me. They were quite
visibly armed with sticks and guns, and initial encounters showed they
would easily push through the police lines.

I made the briefest dedicatory speech in history, clambering back
into our car just as the mob surrounded and frantically began trying to
overturn it. With considerable machismo, our driver pushed slowly through
the crowd, and we finally made it back to the embassy residence. Within
an hour, the mob had chiseled the bronze name plates off the bridge,
eradicating all reference to the venerable bureaucrat Congress had tried
to honor, while energetic Panamanian youths had scaled the huge
superstructure to implant the flag of Panama.

Intervention on a Small Island

More serious than the events in Panama was our involvement in the
Dominican Republic, a small country consisting of the eastern two-thirds
of the island of Hispaniola.

Rafael Trujillo, who had oppressed the country for thirty-one years,
was assassinated on May 30, 1961. With Trujillo’s death, the Administra-
tion threw its support behind the most moderate and uncorrupted leader
then apparent, Joaquin Balaguer, who had been the nominal President

Sailing under a New Skipper 327

under Trujillo. But, on December 19, 1962, an election resulted — to
everyone’s surprise — in a two-to-one victory for Juan Bosch, a writer and
intellectual who had been in exile ever since 1937. Though he was a
rabble-rousing orator, that was the end of his leadership qualifications.
I had lunch with Bosch when he came to Washington just before he took
office, and I have rarely met a man so unrealistic, arrogant, and erratic.
I thought him incapable of running even a small social club, much less a
country in turmoil. He did not seem to me a Communist, as some were
asserting, but merely a muddle-headed, anti-American pedant commit-
ted to unattainable social reforms. He might, I suspected, be easy prey
to the machinations of hard-nosed apparatchiks.

In view of Bosch’s instability and incapacity as a leader, relations
between his government and the United States could not possibly be
easy. He became embroiled in a foolish dispute with Haiti that caused us
brief concern, and on September 25, 1963, a military group overthrew
and exiled him. Led by Colonel Elias Wessin y Wessin, the group was
backed by moderate and rightist civilians. Though in terms of principle
and precedent, we regretted the coup, none of us, to my knowledge,
believed that the Bosch government could have continued much longer
without precipitating a national convulsion. The new junta tried to restore
fiscal sanity but, in the process, increased unemployment, and discontent
spread, particularly among students and intellectuals. The military were
growing increasingly disenchanted with the new government’s efforts to
halt the graft and corruption they had long regarded as their rightful
perquisite.

Thus no one was greatly surprised when, in April 1965, a small group
of young colonels captured the army chief-of-staff and launched another
golpe. I he leaders of the revolt were a mixed bag, including Bosch sup-
porters, a number of ex-Trujillo associates, some supporters of Dr. Joa-
quin Balaguer, and some presumed Communist elements. Still, the
movement gained substantial support from the disenchanted people,
particularly after some of its leaders had seized the national radio and
urged the populace into the streets. But rifts developed in the rebel ranks
when it became increasingly obvious that the principal instigators of the
revolt were planning to recall Juan Bosch. Since he was anathema to the
military, elements of the army led by Colonel Wessin launched a counter-
revolution.

We had every reason to discourage Bosch’s return, but we took no
action to prevent his coming back — nor did we even try to keep him
from constantly telephoning from American territory in Puerto Rico to
incite his supporters at home to do battle. A proxy hero, he declined to
return to his native land unless the United States gave him full protec-
tion, remaining instead in Puerto Rico.

Our ambassador in the Dominican Republic was Tapley Bennett, a

525 The Johnson Years

conservative Georgian who instinctively tended to favor the established
hierarchy. His basic sympathies were clearly with Colonel Wessin, whose
forces appeared initially to have won. Wessin was, however, anything but
a bold leader, and when a popular mass effort prevented his tanks from
crossing the Duarte Bridge into the center of Santo Domingo, his forces
fell back. The pro-Bosch elements seized the police stations and passed
out stolen arms. Wessin’s counteraction was clearly failing.

Though Ambassador Bennett had been reporting that there were
Communists among the rebels (or “constitutionalists” as they were called),
that was not the proximate cause for America’s initial intervention. We
acted to save lives. When the fighting increased, we had instructed the
embassy on April 25 to advise authorities on both sides of the conflict
that we planned to evacuate Americans and others wishing to leave the
country and had requested a cease-fire for that purpose. On Monday,
April 26, the embassy asked American civilians to assemble the next day
at the Embajador Hotel as a staging point for evacuation.

In the morning of Wednesday, April 28, 1965, we were informed
that the government radio, still controlled by the regular armed forces,
had announced the formation of a new junta, headed by an air force
colonel, Pedro Bartolome Benoit, with the avowed objective of restoring
peace and preparing the country for free elections. Benoit promptly
approached Ambassador Bennett and asked that we land twelve hundred
marines to help restore peace, but Bennett gave him no encouragement,
telegraphing Washington that he did not believe the situation yet justi-
fied such action.

But Bennett changed his mind almost immediately. While Rusk,
McNamara, Mac Bundy, Bill Moyers, and I were meeting with the Pres-
ident in his small retreat off the Oval Office talking principally about
Vietnam, someone handed the President a “critic” (highest priority)
message. That message from Bennett reported that “American lives are
in danger” and “the time has come” for a military rescue. The message
stated, as I recall, that some four hundred foreigners, including Ameri-
cans, who were awaiting evacuation in the polo grounds next to the
Embajador Hotel, had now come under gunfire. There was nothing to
do but react quickly. Though none of us wanted to repeat history by
stationing marines in the Dominican Republic, as America had done from
1916 to 1924, we had no option. Within hours, four hundred marines
were ashore without resistance and helicopters were landing on the polo
field. During the balance of the day, I was kept busy calling the Latin
American ambassadors to advise them of an immediate meeting of the
Organization of American States, and, at 7:30 that evening, I attended
a meeting in the Cabinet Room to brief the Congressional leadership,
who expressed their full assent with what we had done.

Looking back, I have never questioned the wisdom of our initial

Sailing under a New Skipper 329

landing, which was an automatic humanitarian response. What I had
failed to anticipate was President Johson’s increasing absorption in the
Dominican problem, to the point where he assumed the direction of day-
to-day policy and became, in effect, the Dominican desk officer. Meet-
ings with him often lasted well into the evening, and J. Edgar Hoover
stimulated his excitement by feeding him FBI reports of known Com-
munists claimed to have been seen in the Dominican Republic. Since
Hoover’s total number was originally only fifty-three (and then raised to
seventy-seven), I thought our increasing pouring in of troops was wildly
disproportionate. But Johnson was fiercely determined that the Domin-
ican Republic should not become another Cuba and was ready to use
almost any means to assure that the Communists did not take over.

At his instructions, key members of the Administration engaged in a
great deal of to-ing and fro-ing. Abe Fortas, whom Johnson was within
three months to appoint to the Supreme Court, undertook a secret mis-
sion to Puerto Rico. Familiar with that island ever since his first involve-
ment as Under Secretary of the Interior under President Roosevelt, he
was an intimate friend of Governor Munoz-Marin, who was, in turn, a
close friend and adviser of Juan Bosch. In the weeks that followed, we
received many telephone calls from “Mr. Davidson’’ (Fortas’s code name,
which — for reasons I forget — was later changed to “Mr. Arnold”). My
old friend John Bartlow Martin, who had been Kennedy’s ambassador
to the Dominican Republic, now flew to Santo Domingo to work with
Ambassador Bennett and provide the President with an independent
judgment; friendly with some of the rebels, he tried unsuccessfully to
bring both sides together. Mac Bundy, Tom Mann, Cyrus Vance, and
Jack Hood Vaughn (who had succeeded Mann as Assistant Secretary of
State for Inter-American Affairs) also went to Santo Domingo, and, in
June, that capital was visited by a special three-man committee of the
OAS, which included Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, our OAS ambas-
sador. While there the committee issued a declaration urging free elec-
tions, general amnesty, and the creation of a provisional government.

Meanwhile, though the swelling influx of American troops had
restored a measure of order, the killing had inevitably left a sour residue
of hatred on both sides, which could not be easily dissipated. When a
solution was finally worked out and elections held on June 1, 1966, it
was, to my mind, almost entirely the result of a extraordinary tour de
force by one of America’s most brilliant negotiators, Ellsworth Bunker.

Bunker, a soft spoken Vermonter (who could, when roused, curse
eloquently) is, in my view, one of the great unsung heroes of modern
American diplomacy. I had first known him during my days of law prac-
tice when I represented the Cuban sugar industry, and Bunker, a suc-
cessful industrialist, was the acknowledged statesman of America’s sugar
refining industry. In the early 1950s, he became ambassador, first to

33° The Johnson Years

Argentina, then to Italy, and from 1956 to 1961 to India. In the early
days of the Kennedy Administration, he successfully mediated the dis-
pute between the Dutch and the Indonesians over West Irian. By taking
a house in the Virginia countryside and installing representatives of the
contending nations in opposite wings, he succeeded by patient but force-
ful pushing, prodding, and persuading to hammer out a settlement. Later
he played the same role of mediation in a dispute between Saudi Arabia
and Egypt over Yemen. Soon after Lyndon Johnson became President,
Ellsworth Bunker was appointed ambassador to the Organization of
American States. His first task was to try to resolve the nagging frictions
between the United States and Panama, producing sufficient agreement
to make possible the restoration of diplomatic relations.

Bunker lived for almost a year in the Dominican Republic in the
tawdry rooms of a run-down hotel with each side threatening to kill him.
By extraordinary patience, skill, the sheer force of his granite will, and
his obvious compassion and integrity, he finally gained the confidence
of the conflicting parties; by the time his assignment was ended, he was
revered by both sides as a “saint.” In the end, he secured agreement for
a provisional President and arranged terms for the surrender of the
rebel arms. He also convinced the right-wing plotters that Washington
would never tolerate another coup. But perhaps his greatest achieve-
ment was to make it plain that no matter how badly the Johnson Admin-
istration might fear a Castro-influenced government, we would never
again support a military junta.

As President Johnson increasingly took over the Dominican crisis, I
quietly sought to disengage. As I shall point out later, I was at that time
preoccupied with a protracted effort to extricate us from Vietnam and
was also dealing with such diverse matters as Cyprus, beef imports,
European problems, economic problems with the Third World, and
troubles in the Congo.

As I watched events unfold, I felt that the deployment of what finally
aggregated twenty-five thousand marines was Texan overkill. Hard
pressed in Vietnam, President Johnson was giving excessive weight to
the questionable threat posed by a small number of alleged Communists
dubiously reported to be in the Dominican Republic. Still, no one raised
a protesting voice except Jack Hood Vaughn, who bravely challenged
the President at a meeting late one evening and then left the room with
an angry exchange when the President rejected his views.

Johnson’s reaction could be understood only against the backdrop of
Castro’s subversion of Cuba which had become a nagging source of worry
and mischief; it had produced the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis in
the Kennedy Administration. In addition, Johnson’s use of excessive
power and effort in the Dominican Republic reflected a wider preoccu-
pation. We were just on the verge of committing large numbers of

Sailing under a New Skipper 33 /

American combat forces to Vietnam and the President feared that a
disaster close to home might lead more Americans to challenge our
adventure ten thousand miles away.

Viewed in retrospect, the exaggerated Dominican reaction did little
harm. Though it stirred up liberal outrage at the time, such outrage was
largely a conditioned reflex; no one could seriously argue that Bosch’s
return would have made anything but a bigger mess. Our intervention
left few permanent scars and, quite unlike Vietnam, produced a rela-
tively benign result. The Balaguer government that finally emerged was,
in my view, the best that could have been found, and the fact that since
1965 th e Dominican Republic has been relatively free from turbulence
and chaos seems to me — if not the proof — at least strong evidence that
the pudding was adequately cooked.

De Gaulle Throws a Spanner into NATO

The Dominican affair was a diversion from larger and more danger-
ous world issues. Since the greatest menace to world peace still lay in the
potential expansion of Soviet power, I remained preoccupied with our
translatlantic relations, including the good health of NATO. In May 1965,
I had flown to London for the ministerial meeting of SEATO (including
a dinner with the Queen at Buckingham Palace). France, true to form,
had abstained from participating, except by sending an observer — an
old friend whom I kept mischievously addressing as “Monsieur le Voy-
eur.” Later I returned to London for the regular meeting of NATO
foreign ministers, which was the one occasion that all the foreign minis-
ters normally attended. I his time, in view of the Dominican crisis, Rusk
proposed that I attend the early sessions; he would arrive for the wind-
ing-up. Only technically violating our commitment to the President that
one of us would be in the United States at all times, I met Dean Rusk as
he arrived in London and immediately took off on his plane for Wash-
ington.

That was, I think, the last time the French foreign minister attended
a NATO meeting. Because President de Gaulle was growing more and
more prickly about transatlantic relations, I decided, with the President’s
approval, to fly to Paris for a talk with the General about both Vietnam
and NATO. Since de Gaulle knew me as his most voluble critic in the
American Administration and I had had a long talk with him only a year
earlier, he greeted me with a friendly but sly smile. “Ah, Monsieur Ball ,
c’est vous encore . ” Then, with a sweeping gesture he indicated the chair
on which I would sit during our interview: so placed as to give him the
maximum advantage of his impressive height. His opening comment
was, as always, brief and to the point: “Monsieur Ball, je vous ecoute.”

We quickly concluded a discussion of Southeast Asia, in which he

332 The Johnson Years

reiterated his by now familiar views about the mistakes we were making,
and I raised the question of the emerging problems within the Western
alliance. I pointed out that many Europeans — including members of de
Gaulle’s own government — felt that the United States had come too late
into both world wars. Our current commitments for the defense of
Europe reflected our belief that an alliance could be effective only if
reinforced by a combined or integrated command, common planning,
and forces in being. That — and that alone — would give reality to the
commitment. Thus, as we saw it, the North Atlantic Treaty and the alli-
ance organization (NATO) were inextricably linked.

De Gaulle then came to the heart of the message he wished me to
convey to the President. He stated quite emphatically that France and
America must stand together against the Soviet Union, and his govern-
ment did not intend to break up the alliance. In any event, there would
still be a de facto understanding for common defense even if no signed
treaty existed. But NATO as an organization was separate from the
mutual defense commitment and it raised different questions. NATO
had not existed at the time the treaty was signed; since then, two major
changes had taken place. The first was the development of a Soviet nu-
clear capability. After that, no one in Europe — or even the United
States — could be sure that America would launch a nuclear response in
the event of an attack.

The second change had been the transformation of the Western
European nations from weakness and dependency to the point where
they were now reasserting their national personalities. France could no
longer accept the principle of subordination — which was what integra-
tion implied — nor could it tolerate control by “foreign authority.’’ I hus,
said President de Gaulle, though France would continue to adhere to
the alliance, he regarded NATO as no longer suitable; France would
withdraw from it. Even the Germans, he thought, were beginning to
want an alliance without subordination.

Nor, he suggested, could NATO remain in France, for his country
could tolerate no foreign forces on her soil except under French com-
mand. The French government was making no proposals now — nor
would it make proposals in the future. But it would, at the proper time,
lay down conditions in discussions between France and the United States
that would not include either Germany or the United Kingdom.

I replied that the United States was not interested in domination but
in efficiency and effectiveness. We wanted to assure that the West would
be fully defended. History had made it crystal clear that an integrated
command was necessary to an effective common defense. The atom bomb
had obviously brought about significant changes in modern warfare, and
we were anxious to halt its proliferation. But, though the United States
would be as disturbed as France by a German national nuclear capability,

Sailing under a New Skipper 333

that did not mean the problem of atomic management could be disre-
garded. In our view, nations that had historically played a great role in
world affairs could not be expected to accept forever a situation in which
they had no part in their own nuclear defense. Either we permitted those
nations to develop national nuclear systems or we provided some collec-
tive approach. That concern had inspired our proposal for a seaborne
multilateral nuclear force, and within the next few months we would
resume conversations about it. I told de Gaulle that we were prepared
to discuss with France any proposed changes that might be made in the
NATO organization, but if there were to be such an exchange, it should
not be postponed too long — as the present organization could be impaired
by unresolved questions.

De Gaulle replied that the efficiency of the alliance would be seri-
ously impaired if some members felt subordinated to others, which was
the present situation. So far as the Germans were concerned, he must
express a note of precaution. We both knew that the Germans were a
“great people,” but, just because they were a “great people,” no one could
tell exactly what they would do. Obviously, Germany could not be
accepted with regard to nuclear matters on the same basis as other
nations. German participation in the control of atomic weapons, whether
partial or direct, would certainly ruin any possible contacts with Soviet
Russia or Eastern Europe. France could not forget the past.

I noted our difference in view, pointing out that in the last fifty years,
German aggression had been stimulated by German isolation and by a
feeling that it was not an equal member of the Western community; I
felt that any discrimination or sense of grievance or inequality would
play into the hands of demagogues. We should try, in dealing with Ger-
many, to eliminate that sense of discrimination and give the Germans a
feeling of equality. We should seek to forestall demands for a German
national nuclear system by providing for their participation in some kind
of collective nuclear arrangement. That was a concern of the United
States, and we certainly hoped to discuss it further with the French gov-
ernment at some future date.

At the end, after thanking me, he observed that “Great powers have
to choose between great difficulties. The United States is a very great
power, and your choices, therefore, are exceptionally difficult.”

I left the meeting impressed with the sensational news I had just
heard from de Gaulle. Now, for the first time, the French government
had informed us that France planned to withdraw from NATO and expel
the organization from its soil. But when I reported this to Washington,
few of my colleagues believed that de Gaulle would do exactly what he
stated. So, on February 21, 1966, when President de Gaulle told a press
conference that France was ending participation in the NATO organi-
zation, that all French ground, air, and naval forces would be withdrawn

334 The Johnson Years

from the NATO command, and that NATO military headquarters and
American bases in France would have to be removed, it created greater
consternation than should have occurred.

The French action seemed to me to raise a whole set of questions.
First, would NATO be badly weakened by France’s departure, and where
would the organization find a new home? Second, how would Germany
react? That remained my abiding concern, since I was determined that
we keep Germany facing firmly West and fully integrated in the alli-
ance. I continued to be preoccupied with the implicit inequality of
denying Germany a nuclear role; although I was as firm as de Gaulle in
believing that Germany must never develop a national nuclear capabil-
ity, it should otherwise have full equality. Third, I was concerned at the
effect of the French move on an effective Western defense. Steeped in
the history of the First and Second World Wars, I was aware of the
catastrophe caused by the French and British failure to integrate their
operations and consolidate their planning under a single command
structure. (Monnet had taught me that.) Fourth, I worried about how
Congress and American opinion might react to France’s withdrawal.
Senator Mansfield was strongly pressing for the return of American
forces from Europe; anger at de Gaulle might, I feared, strengthen his
hand.

In acting imperiously toward NATO, de Gaulle was exploiting the
geographical position of France between Germany and the Atlantic. He
implied as much when he told me with remarkable candor, “There would
still be a de facto understanding for common defense, even if no signed
treaty existed.” The United States, in other words, would have to defend
France in order to defend Germany and Western Europe. That permit-
ted de Gaulle to play a nationalistic game with impunity, knowing that
whatever he did, his country would be protected by American power. I
found that mischievous and annoying; for, after all, the alliance was suf-
ficiently fragile even without the French flaunting their sovereignty.
Other nations, aware of their limited national resources, acknowledged
the need to cooperate within both the European Community and the
Atlantic alliance.

The Problem of Germany's Role in Europe

Germany remained for me the central point of hope and concern for
European security. Not only, as de Gaulle pointed out, was it a nation
with a gifted people, capable of great good or evil, but it was also subject
to competing forces stemming both from history and its geopolitical
position. That later became increasingly apparent with the evolution of
Ostpolitik. The West Germans needed to establish working relations with
the Soviets and Eastern Europe; only thus could they negotiate the return

Sailing under a New Skipper 5 35

of their countrymen left behind when the Potsdam Conference ceded
most of Upper Silesia to Poland or secure arrangements for freeing
movement and communication to mitigate the agonies of separation for
Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

It was sensitivity to German pride that led me to seek a safe nuclear
role for Germany through the Multilateral Force, though in retrospect
I probably overemphasized the Germans’ desire for a nuclear role and
exaggerated the dangers latent in their continued exclusion from the
nuclear club. Yet I do not doubt that I was right in pressing for improved
relations between Bonn and Washington. Those relations had been
piickly but basically firm during the long period of Adenauer’s chancel-
lorship. Now Erhard was Chancellor, and he was a different kind of
man. Much milder than Adenauer, he was deeply attracted to America
and, I thought, unquestionably a good friend. Still, he did not always
understand American feelings.

President Johnson, on his part, prided himself on a special under-
standing of Germans because he had grown up in a German community
in West Texas. And, since he liked Erhard both as a German and an
individual, he more than once extended what he regarded as a special
gesture of friendship by receiving him at his ranch on the Pedernales.

I hat, however, created an awkward problem. The German ambassador
told me privately that Erhard was embarrassed in the eyes of the Ger-
man public, who interpreted the fact that he was not asked to the White
House as second-class treatment. How could I explain that to LBJ? For
him, the ranch was a far more glorious place than 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue. I finally did manage to get the point across gently, and on his
next trip Erhard was invited to Washington rather than Texas.

Politics and Personalities

Even as late as the early decades of this century the friendship of
princes, often reinforced by blood ties, was still a powerful factor in
shaping the relations between nations — as one realizes on re-reading the
famous correspondence between “Willy and Nicky,” the German Kaiser
and Russian Czar. Today the jet plane and telephone threaten once more
to exaggerate the personal element, with the result that all too often the
objective assessment of national interests and a larger world strategy are
subverted by the complex chemistry of personalities. That injects an
aleatory element that makes national decisions hard to predict and
sometimes leads to unwise policy. I had seen the process at work during
the Nassau Conference when John F. Kennedy had — with little appraisal
of longer-iange implications — offered the British a whole new genera-
tion of nuclear weapons, very largely because of his fondness for Harold
Macmillan.

336 The Johnson Years

With Lyndon Johnson as President, the personal element played an
even more powerful role. He respected de Gaulle as a leader largely
because of his presumption, cunning, and imperial style. He incessantly
restrained me from making critical comments, even though he could
never have taken the General’s constant needling from any other for-
eign leader. Anglo-American relations were tacitly acknowledged to be
a class by themselves, but they did not flourish during the Johnson era—
largely because the Labor party came in from the cold in October 1964,
soon after Johnson’s inauguration. LBJ had been impressed with Mac-
millan, even though he lacked the long personal acquaintance and fam-
ily friendships that had existed between Macmillan and Kennedy. Harold
Wilson, however, lacked Macmillan’s consummate ability to deal on a
friendly but slightly condescending basis. He wore no patrician armor,
was too ordinary, too much like other politicians with whom LBJ had
dealt, and Johnson took an almost instant dislike to him. On Wilson’s
first visit to President Johnson in Washington on December 7, 1964,
relations got off to a bad start over the Prime Minister’s insistence that
his assistant, Marcia Williams, attend highly restricted meetings; she did
not, in Johnson’s view, have the rank to justify it. I hen, as time wore on,
Wilson’s reluctance to provide a wholehearted endorsement of John-
son’s Vietnam adventures and his efforts at diplomatic intervention
touched the President’s most hypersensitive nerve. Finally, J. Edgar
Hoover made a bad situation worse by contributing scurrilous rumors
about Wilson’s personal character.

What Johnson wanted from f oreign political leaders was unquestion-
ing support for the policy about which he was the most unceitain. the
Vietnam War. Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt most clearly won
Johnson’s heart when he publicly shouted, in exchanging first greetings
on the White House grounds, “All the way with LBJ. Even though I
knew that this rash pronouncement had assured the success of Holts
visit, the statement in that context was, I told my colleague George
Springsteen, to be deplored as contributing to the delinquency of a Pres-
ident.

As our involvement in Vietnam lengthened, deepened, and broad-
ened, the Administration’s top foreign policy officials — and the President
himself— progressively constricted their vision. The metaphor I thought
most apt was that of a camera, focused sharply on a small object in the
immediate foreground but with no depth of field, so that all other objects
were fuzzy and obscure. Still, occasions did arise where the very fact of
my colleagues’ narrow preoccupation made it possible for me to under-
take the management of certain dangerous situations with a relatively
free hand so long as they did not directly relate to our Vietnamese agony.
Included in this category were, among others, the troubles in a small
country in the eastern Mediterranean, Cyprus — a bountiful and beauti-

Cyprus 337

ful earthly paradise marred only by man’s bloody-mindedness to man.
My efforts to resolve the Cyprus problem consumed much of my thought
and energies for a protracted period.

23 . Cyprus

In my State Department office was a large lighted globe. One
day in the course of a newspaper interview I pointed to it, saying “You
see that globe? I’m going to get rid of the damn thing. When I spin it, I
find trouble wherever it stops.” It was a passing comment, and I forgot
all about it until my interrogator included the comment in his column.
A fortnight later I received a letter from a little girl in Kansas: “I read
in the paper that you have a lighted globe you’re going to get rid of.
Could I have it? I’m having trouble with my geography.”

A Troubled Island

I did not send the globe. Not only was it government property but I
too was having trouble with geography, and particularly with a small
island that has been a source of great-power conflict almost from the
beginning of history. Strategically located in the eastern Mediterranean,
Cyprus has had one absentee landlord after another: first Egypt, then
Greece, which colonized the island, then Rome. It has been occupied
successively by Richard the Lionhearted, the Templars, the Franks, the
Venetians, and the 1 urks. In 1878, the British acquired it from Turkey
in exchange for help in defending the Turks against Russia, and in 1925
the island was declared a British Crown colony.

In addition to its strategic geography, the island is tailor-made for
ethnic troubles. Though it lies 40 miles off the Turkish coast and 560
miles from the Greek mainland, roughly 80 percent of its population is
of Greek, and less than 20 percent of Turkish, extraction. Even before
the Second World War, the mainland Greeks had joined with the Greek
Cypriotes in calling for enosis — the union of Cyprus with Greece — but
both Britain and Turkey rejected that demand. An organization known
as EOKA, headed by General George Grivas, began a terror campaign
in support of enosis , aided by Archbishop Makarios III, the head of the
Orthodox Church in Cyprus and the effective leader of the island’s Greek
community. In March 1956, the British government exiled Makarios to
the Seychelles because of his encouragement of EOKA violence, permit-
ting him to return to Greece the following year only after he agreed to
call for an end of the terror.

33S The Johnson Years

But terror continued until, in 1959, Britain granted independence
to Cyprus within a framework of international agreements signed by
Greece, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and representatives of the Greek
and Turkish communities on Cyprus. Though the agreements — embod-
ied in what became known as the London- Zurich Accords — were an
impressive diplomatic tour de force, their provisions, which covered 220
pages, were too complex to be workable. The Cypriote Constitution they
established provided, among other things, that the President would always
be a Greek Cypriote and the Vice-President, a Turkish Cypriote — with
each being able to block any significant action of the other. The same
unworkable division applied to the balance of the government and the
legislature.

This elaborate effort to maintain an inherently fragile balance was
bound to fail, and it failed quickly. In November 1963, Archbishop Ma-
karios, the first President of Cyprus, proposed constitutional revisions
that would have destroyed most of the safeguards the Turks had fought
to obtain. Warfare broke out between the Greek and 1 urkish commu-
nities; during Christmas week, more than three hundred people were
killed.

After the United Nations Security Council had been brought into the
peace-keeping process, the Cyprus problem presented the following
complexities: hrst, it threatened to produce an armed conflict between
Greece and Turkey; second, it affected the relations of the Greek and
Turkish governments with the government of Cyprus; third, it involved
Great Britain as one of the guarantor powers with strategic bases on the
island; fourth, it affected the relationship of the government of Cyprus
to the British Commonwealth, of which it was a member; fifth, it threat-
ened the stability of one flank of our NATO defenses and consequently
concerned all NATO partners; sixth, it became an active item in the
parliamentary diplomacy practiced in New York; seventh, its instabilities
stimulated a new relationship between the government of Cypius and
other nonaligned countries with which it had recently sought to associate
itself ; and eighth, Archbishop Makarios’s flirtations with Moscow threat-
ened to bring about the intrusion of the Soviet Union into the strategic
eastern Mediterranean.

Each of these elements bore on the others, and one element often
frustrated the effective utilization of others in the search for a solution.
On December 24, 1963, the British, Greek, and I urkish goveinments,
as the guarantor powers, appealed to Makarios and other Gieek and
Turkish Cypriote leaders for a cease-fire. The following day, however,
Greek and Turkish forces moved out of their bases in Cyprus, and bloody
battles ensued. Unable to persuade the Greek and 1 urkish commanders
to join in three-nation truce patrols, the British undertook their own.

Istanbul

Aegean Sea

Ankara#

TURKEY

Nicosia

CYPRUS

Mediterranean Sea

LEBANON

SYRIA

ISRAELI

JORDAN

EGYPT

KILOMETERS

MILES

CYPRUS-1964

3^o The Johnson Years

Threat of Greek-Turkish War

Watching from Washington, we could see that open warfare was
imminent. Since the Turkish Cypriote population was suffering the
greater casualties, Turkey was on the verge of intervening. To defuse
the situation, Sir Duncan Sandys, the British Secretary of State for the
Commonwealth and Colonies, proposed a peace plan calling for, among
other things, the establishment of a British-controlled neutral zone in
Nicosia to keep the two communities apart. Though that temporarily
slowed the fighting, the two communities remained at sword’s point. The
Turkish Cypriotes declared the constitution dead, implying that, since
the two communities could not live together, partition was the only
solution. Makarios demanded the abolition of the London-Zurich
Accords and particularly their provisions for intervention by any of the
three guarantor powers.

Cyprus was merely one more step in Britain’s painful shedding of
empire, and London no longer had the will or the resources to preside
over such a quarrel. Thus I was not surprised when, on January 25,
1964, the British ambassador, Sir David Ormsby-Gore, called to tell me
that Britain could no longer keep the peace alone and that an interna-
tional force should be established on Cyprus as soon as possible. Such a
force, the ambassador insisted, could be “broadly based” yet limited to
detachments from NATO nations. The British needed, most of all, our
diplomatic support and a United States contingent with supplies and
airlift for the international force.

I stated emphatically that the United States did not want to get
involved; we already had far too much on our plate. I was sick at heart
at our deepening embroilment in Vietnam; at the same time, we faced
mounting troubles in Panama, had an irksome involvement in the Congo,
were disputing with the Soviets over Berlin, and foresaw mounting dif-
ficulties with Indonesia. But the British were adamant. They would no
longer carry the Cyprus burden alone, even though involving the United
Nations risked giving the Communist countries leverage in that strate-
gically placed island. The United Nations would dither and the 7 urks
would not wait; tired of continued outrages against Turkish Cypriotes,
they would invade. Then we would have a full-scale war between two
NATO allies in the eastern Mediterranean. Reports from Ankara were
already indicating that the Turks considered their ultimate military
intervention as almost inevitable — out of their hands and to be deter-
mined by events.

When I discussed the question with our UN ambassador, Adlai Ste-
venson, he responded with far more heat than I had expected. During
the “troubles” he had stayed for three days in Archbishop Makarios’s
residence and he regarded his former host with total contempt. The
Archbishop was, he said, a wicked, unreliable conniver who concealed

Cyprus 341

his venality under the sanctimonious vestments of a religious leader; the
only way to deal with Makarios, Stevenson assured me, was by “giving
the old bastard absolute hell.’’ In all the years I had known Adlai I had
never heard him speak of anyone with such vitriol. “I have sat across the
table from that pious looking replica of Jesus Christ,” he said, “and if
you saw him with his beard shaved and a push-cart, you would recall the
old saying that there hasn’t been an honest thief since Barabbas.”

The United States Becomes Involved

I met with Secretary Robert McNamara at five that afternoon (Jan-
uary 25), and we reviewed the Cyprus problem in all its complexities.
Though Bob was as unhappy as I at any broadening of our responsibil-
ities, he was fully aware that an exploding Cyprus could not only endan-
ger our Mediterranean position but undermine the whole southern flank
of NATO. I discussed the matter later that evening with President John-
son. His reluctance came through loud and clear, but he quickly
grasped the seriousness of the Cyprus problem and directed me to come
up with an acceptable solution.

I told Bob McNamara that before committing ourselves to the com-
bined force we should insist on three conditions: that the duration of the
force be limited to three months, that the Turks and Greeks agree not
to use their unilateral intervention rights for three months, and that they
agree on a mediator who was not a representative of any of the guaran-
tor powers but from another NATO European country. Finally, we would
insist that the American contingent not exceed twelve hundred men,
with the British agreeing to put in four thousand and the balance of ten
thousand to come from other European nations. Meanwhile, David
Bruce, our astute ambassador in London, was assuring me that we had
no option but to participate; otherwise, no other country would take
action, and the Turks would inevitably move. That advice was rein-
forced when, that same day of January 28, 1964, Turkish Prime Minister
Ismet Inonu told our ambassador in Ankara, Raymond Hare, that the
Turks were going to invade unless we gave them some kind of an answer
by the next morning.

In their anxiety to commit us, the British leaked my three conditions
to the press prematurely, and I had to deal with an outraged President.
Moreover, I was annoyed that Duncan Sandys, without telling me, had
on February 3 tried out our Anglo-American proposal for a NATO force
on Cypriote Foreign Minister Spyros Kyprianou, who was attending the
London conference. When Kyprianou reported our proposal to Nicosia,
Makarios rejected it out of hand. If we were to work with the British,
actions had to be carefully coordinated without the premature exposure
of our thinking.

Meanwhile, violence continued in Cyprus with hostages taken by each

34 2 The Johnson Years

side; on February 4, a bomb exploded in our embassy in Nicosia. Since
the situation had now reached a critical Hash point, we clearly needed
someone on the spot not accredited to any one of the five nations actively
involved. Thus, on February 8, I Hew to London. At the same time, a
second level of activity was under way in New York, where Stevenson
was valiantly resisting the efforts of the Cypriote ambassador to the
United Nations to get a UN force appointed.

At this moment the respective positions of the parties were: The
Turkish Cypriotes demanded partition and the right to govern their
own community; they also insisted on preserving Turkey’s right to
intervene under the London-Zurich Accords, since otherwise the
Turkish Cypriotes might be wiped out by their Greek Cypriote neigh-
bors, who outnumbered them four to one. The Turkish govern-
ment in Ankara supported the Turkish Cypriotes, while putting special
emphasis on the preservation of Turkey’s right to intervene by force.
The Greek community on Cyprus wanted union with Greece (< enosis ),
but, at least for tactical purposes, was demanding a fully independent
Cyprus run by the Greek majority. The Greek government in Athens
pressed for enosis.

Viewed from Washington, the issues were clear enough. Cyprus was
a strategically important piece of real estate at issue between two NATO
partners: Greece and Turkey. We needed to keep it under NATO con-
trol. The Turks would never give up their intervention rights or be
deterred from invading by the interjection of a UN force which they
would regard as an instrument of Soviet or Third-World politics and
subject to manipulation by Makarios.

My first and most urgent task was to coordinate our activities with
the British and make sure that Duncan Sandys did not again act unilat-
erally. Makarios must be approached in person and not through his for-
eign minister, who, in his own right, had no authority.

Mission to the Center of Conflict

I had no illusions that I could easily shake Makarios out of his intran-
sigence, but I had to try. If he finally turned us down, I planned to say
to the guarantor powers: take the problem to the Security Council but
understand that America will supply no component for any UN force.
Though I recognized that this might trigger a Turkish invasion, I pro-
posed to tell Makarios that, if he continued to block a solution that would
eliminate Turkey’s reason for intervening, we would not protect him
from a Turkish move.

I made these points to Sandys when we met on February 9, 1964. I
told him I was planning to go to Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus and
described the strategy I would follow. He and I discussed all the solu-

Cyprus 343

tions we could think of, including all permutations and combinations
that might improve the plan’s marketability. Since the President had lent
me an airplane, I asked Sandys to make the tour with me, but, presum-
ably out of a desire to limit Britain’s responsibility, he declined. Later
that same night I saw Cypriote Foreign Minister Kyprianou and tried to
sound him out on the Archbishop’s real intentions.

I went first to Turkey to meet with Prime Minister Ismet Inonu. I
had looked forward to the meeting not only because of its relevance to
my mission but because of the Prime Minister’s history and personality.
Inonu, who in his early life had been known as Ismet Pasha, was a leg-
endary figure. Chief of staff to Kemal Ataturk during the war against
the Greeks in the early 1920s, he had taken the name Inonu from a
village where he won two battles. Serving as Turkey’s first Prime Minis-
ter from 1923 to 1937 and then, after Ataturk’s death, as its President
from 1938 to 1950, he had led in transforming Turkey into a modern
state. Now at eighty, once again Prime Minister, he provided stability
and strength to a nation beset with troubles.

A small wiry man, Inonu’s quiet voice projected force and conviction.
He did not try to conceal his deep worry about the direction of events
on Cyprus. We must, he insisted, move swiftly; Turkish patience was
running out. Given the excited state of public opinion, any overnight
flare-up of killing on the island might force the Turkish military to
intervene. Turkey would, of course, have an overwhelming military
advantage. Not only was it far larger and better armed than Greece, but
Cyprus was outside the range of Greek fighter planes. As I expected,
Inonu was as direct in his approach as Makarios was devious. So long as
nothing was done to impair Turkey’s right of intervention to protect the
Turkish Cypriote population, the Turkish government was prepared to
go along with the Anglo-American proposal for a NATO force.

If I felt reassured that Turkey had a strong and responsible govern-
ment, Greece had no government at all. Prime Minister Konstantinos
Karamanlis had resigned the year before, when King Paul had rejected
his advice, and, since then, there had been a succession of caretaker gov-
ernments. I hough the caretaker Prime Minister, Ionnis Paraskevopou-
los, received me courteously, he could make no commitments, saying
only that the Greek government would probably approve any plan first
approved by Makarios.

Meetings with His Beatitude

I arrived to find Nicosia an armed camp with barbed wire demarcat-
ing a so-called “green line” separating the Greek and Turkish commu-
nities. Access from one zone to another was restricted to designated check
points. Jeeps containing British forces with tommy guns and Cypriote

344 The Johnson Years

police roamed the area and patrolled the neutral zone that lay between
the separate rolls of barbed wire.

On my first meeting with His Beatitude (as Archbishop Makarios was
addressed) on February 12 , I was accompanied by Joseph Sisco, the
Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs; his
deputy, Jack Jernagan; and Frazer Wilkins, the United States Ambassa-
dor to Cyprus. British interests were brilliantly represented by Sir Cyril
Pickard, Assistant Under Secretary of State for the Commonwealth
Relations Office, who was, at the time, Acting High Commissioner for
Cyprus. Makarios received us on the porch of his residence, formerly
the residence of the British colonial governor. Resplendent in the full
regalia of his ecclesiastical office, he wore a tall black head-covering with
a mantia in the rear, while about his neck was a gold chain, from which
depended a large medallion known as a panagia. It contained a represen-
tation of Christ holding a book in his left hand while the fingers of the
right hand were frozen in the gesture of giving blessing. Resting on
the Archbishop’s chest, the medallion symbolized a “confessor from the
heart’’ to remind the wearer that he was always to have God in his heart.
I saw few signs of that in the days that followed.

After the traditional tiresome pleasantries, the Archbishop led us to
his study, where he went through an astonishing striptease, removing
his gold chain, his head covering, and his robes until reduced to shirt
sleeves. Newspaper pictures of the Archbishop, with his beard and cler-
ical trappings, had given me an impression of a venerable ecclesiastic.
Now I found myself facing a tough, cynical man of fifty-one, far more
suited to temporal command than spiritual inspiration. (As I com-
mented later to President Johnson, “He must be cheating about his age;
no one could acquire so much guile in only fifty-one years.”) Since he
had spent some months in a seminary near Boston, he spoke only slightly
accented English, and his conversation was marked by a whimsical, often
macabre humor that both amused and appalled me. Of medium height,
with eyes that peered through narrow eyelids, he seemed about to relish
the fencing match in which we were to engage.

Our morning meeting was relatively calm and uneventful. As we
explained our respective positions, Makarios gave nothing away. When
we parted for lunch, he carefully rerobed, putting on all his parapher-
nalia for the photographers who assaulted us on the porch; when we
returned for our afternoon meeting, he once again repeated his strip-
tease.

I can describe the afternoon session only as “bloody.” The Arch-
bishop was unrelenting in repeating a litany he knew I would never
accept. The whole matter must be submitted to the UN Security Council;
and the United Nations must guarantee the political independence and
territorial integrity of Cyprus. That meant, as I told my British colleague

Cyprus 345

later, that Makarios’s central interest was to block off Turkish interven-
tion so that he and his Greek Cypriotes could go on happily massacring
Turkish Cypriotes. Obviously we would never permit that.

Much to my delight, my British colleague, Sir Cyril Pickard, proved
tough and resourceful. In the great tradition of British proconsuls, he
was deeply dedicated to stopping the wanton killing and returning peace
to the island. Nor did he bother with diplomatic politesse in expressing
his contempt for the bloody-mindedness that Makarios and his govern-
ment were displaying. After Pickard had denounced the Archbishop in
devastating language for the outrages inflicted on the Turkish Cypri-
otes, I spent the next forty-five minutes telling off Makarios and his min-
isters. I spoke, as I telegraphed the President that night, “in a fashion
remote from diplomatic exchanges,” describing in lurid detail the con-
sequences if he persisted in his cruel and reckless conduct. The Turks,
I said, would inevitably invade, and neither the United States nor any
other Western power would raise a finger to stop them. Though Maka-
rios tried to conceal his discomfiture, I had the odd feeling as we left the
room that, as I reported to the President, “even his beard seemed pale.”

That night I conversed with the President and Secretary Rusk through
the scrambled — and hence secure — teletype in the embassy, telling them
that, in my view, a blow-up was exceedingly possible and that over-
whelming pressure must be brought on Makarios “to frighten him suf-
ficiently to consider some move to halt the killing.”

Cyprus Anecdotes

Three or four vignettes of my Cyprus days stand out sharply in my
memory. A massacre took place in Limassol on the south coast in which,
as I recall, about fifty Turkish Cypriotes were killed — in some cases by
bulldozers crushing their flimsy houses. As Makarios and I walked out
of the meeting together on the second day, I said to him sharply that
such beastly actions had to stop, that the previous night’s affair was
intolerable, and that he must halt the violence. With amused tolerance,
he replied, “But, Mr. Secretary, the Greeks and Turks have lived together
for two thousand years on this island and there have always been occa-
sional incidents; we are quite used to this.” I was furious at such a bland
reply. “Your Beatitude,” I said, “I’ve been trying for the last two days to
make the simple point that this is not the Middle Ages but the latter part
of the twentieth century. The world’s not going to stand idly by and let
you turn this beautiful little island into your private abattoir.” Instead of
the outburst I had expected, he said quietly, with a sad smile, “Oh, you’re
a hard man, Mr. Secretary, a very hard man!”

At another point in our conversation on the second day, I spoke so
heatedly at his apparent indifference to bloodshed that I heard myself

3^6 The Johnson Years

saying, “For Christ’s sake, Your Beatitude, you can’t do that!” — realizing
as I spoke that it was scarcely an appropriate diplomatic reply, even to
an irreligious ecclesiastic. Also on the second day, when we sat down
around the table, he said, with obvious amusement, “I know you’re a
famous lawyer, Mr. Secretary. Mr. Spyros Kyprianou, my Foreign Min-
ister, is also a lawyer and so is Mr. Glafkos Clerides, my Minister of Jus-
tice.” Then he added with a chuckle, “I think I must be the only layman
in the room.”

On the third day — and final morning — the Archbishop and I had a
quiet talk alone in his study. Rather whimsically, he said, “I like you, Mr.
Secretary, you speak candidly and I respect that. It’s too bad we couldn’t
have met under happier circumstances. Then, I’m sure, we could have
been friends.” A brief pause and then he said, “We’ve talked about many
things and we’ve been frank with one another. I think it right to say that
we’ve developed a considerable rapport. Yet there’s one thing I haven’t
asked you and I don’t know whether I should or not, but I shall anyway.
Do you think I should be killed by the Turks or the Greeks? Better by
the Greeks, wouldn’t you think?”

“Well,” I replied, “I agree that we’ve talked frankly to one another
about many things and that we have established a rapport. But as to the
matter you’ve just raised with me, Your Beatitude, that’s your problem!’’

One final incident during my stay in Cyprus sticks in my mind. Quite
by accident while I was in Cyprus, British Prime Minister Sir Alec
Douglas-Home, and British Foreign Secretary “Rab” Butler, were pay-
ing a working visit to President Johnson. Each night I carried on a long
teletype conversation directly with them and Secretary Rusk. Late in the
night of the second day, I teletyped that I wanted to make one final
effort to get the Archbishop in line by offering a new variant of our
proposal. After discussion back and forth in which both the President
and Prime Minister took part, I received their blessing to go ahead. The
next day, I played my final card but still could not budge Makarios. I
sent a message around the diplomatic circuit advising of what I had done
and received an angry rocket from Duncan Sandys, vehemently com-
plaining that I had put forward a proposal that differred from those on
which he and I had agreed. “I hope,” he wired, “that such conduct will
not be repeated.” Apparently he was still smarting because I had rebuked
him when he had put our proposals prematurely to Kyprianou.

I replied with a personal message that he had no basis for a sense of
outrage. The proposal I made to His Beatitude was, I wrote, approved
by the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great
Britain, adding, “Should I seek higher authority?” Sandys replied
promptly with a message apologizing for the “misunderstanding” and
inviting me to lunch with him at his house Sunday in London. It was a
pleasant lunch, and he and I have remained friends to this day.

Cyprus 34 j

Continued Efforts to Avoid Disaster

Convinced that only time and events could shake the Archbishop, I
flew back to Ankara to see Inonu and tell the Turks that we had not
given up; in going forward through UN channels we would make sure
that the United Nations took no action derogating from their interven-
tion rights under the Accords. Inonu reluctantly agreed but emphasized
that if there were further serious violence on the island, Turkey would
no longer stand still.

On the night of February 14, I flew to London intending to meet
with my British colleagues the next morning. Because the embassy resi-
dence was filled with other visitors, my staff and I were housed in a
West End hotel, the Grosvenor House. I was tired and disheartened —
so deeply concerned at the danger of an imminent Greek-Turkish war
that I could not sleep. After several hours of fretting over the problem,
I devised one last card to be played. At three in the morning, I aroused
my staff and began to dictate. By six o’clock, with a draft in shape for
final typing, I decided to walk over to the chancery and get ready for
the day. On the way, I bought a copy of the Telegraph , which had my
picture on the front page. When I reached the chancery, the marine
guard refused to admit me. “You claim to be the Under Secretary of
State, but how do I know?” Inspired, I showed him a copy of the news-
paper. It proved an adequate laissez-passer.

I promptly telegraphed the President advising him of my proposal,
which, I said, I was putting to the British solely as an idea of my own
that did not in any way represent the views of my government. Makarios,
I argued, would never agree to a peace-keeping force even half-way
adequate to do the job, and, “if he does agree, it will only be after the
Cypriotes have exhausted all pettifogging possibilities to try to get the
Security Council to nullify the Turks’ rights of intervention.’’ “The Greek
Cypriotes,’’ I wrote, “do not want a peace-keeping force; they just want
to be left alone to kill 1 urkish Cypriotes.’’ Meanwhile, I emphasized, the
Turks would not wait for a protracted Security Council hassle.

My new plan sought to create a peace-keeping force not requiring
the consent of the Makarios government. To do that, the three guar-
antor powers — Britain, Greece, and Turkey — should take joint action
to exercise the rights of intervention provided by the London-Zurich
Accords. 1 hey should move forces into Cyprus simultaneously. Those
forces would be broken into small units that would be billeted together.
All patrols would be organized on the pattern followed in Vienna during
the four-power occupation after World War II — only this time, three,
rather than four, men in a jeep — and all operations would be conducted
together. The force would stay in Cyprus until an effective international
force, within the framework of the United Nations, had not only been

The Johnson Years

created but was actually on the ground, or until a political settlement
had “been reached and translated into a viable organic document.”

There were, as I saw it, a number of advantages to the scheme. It
would assure the Turks that their Cypriote community was protected
while the UN proceedings plodded their weary way. It would avoid any
suggestion of a partition and discourage communal massacres, since
members of the two communities would not have to fear the interven-
tion of a hostile force. The three powers could answer international
criticism on the ground that they were acting under the terms of the
treaty.

If the British went along with my scheme, I had no doubt that Inonu
would accept it. But the British wanted above all to divest themselves of
responsibility for Cyprus; my scheme would reinject them into the mess.
As a result, I returned to the United States without anything clearly in
place to stop the war.

Falling Back on the United Nations

When I reported to the President, he agreed that the United States
had gone as far as we should to try to deflect a tribal conflict. Now our
only available course was to work through the United Nations. On Feb-
ruary 15, Britain and Cyprus requested an emergency session of the
Security Council, and the debate opened on February 18. For the time
being, the day-to-day action shifted largely to Ambassador Adlai Steven-
son, although I retained the overall direction of strategy.

There is no point in recounting the wearisome maneuvering that
went on during the UN proceedings. We wanted to install a UN force as
quickly as possible, while assuring that the resolution did not nullify the
intervention rights of the guarantor powers, since the Turks would not
stand still for that. We sought also to keep the Soviet Union as far as
possible out of the action.

After masterful politicking by Stevenson and our UN mission, the
Security Council, on March 5, resolved to create a peace-keeping force
and provided for the appointment of a mediator. Though we hailed the
resolution as avoiding the immediate danger of a blow-up, none of us
saw it as more than a temporary respite. The parties most directly inter-
ested interpreted the resolution in opposite ways: Makarios regarded it
as foreclosing the Turkish right to intervene; the Turks saw it as pre-
serving their intervention rights.

Weakness of Greek Government

Meanwhile, Greek politics took a discouraging turn, when, on Feb-
ruary 19, seventy-six-year-old George Papandreou won a landslide vie-

Cyprus 349

tory. As head of the Center Union party, he had been in the opposition
for half a century; he knew how to oppose but had neither taste nor
talent for positive action. A hopelessly weak leader, he found it expedi-
ent to play along with Makarios and the advocates of enosis. To a large
extent, as I saw it, he was under the influence of his son, Andreas Papan-
dreou, for many years a professor of economics in several American
universities, who was trying to gain a foothold in Greek politics by play-
ing closely with the Communist bloc. Oddly enough, in spite of his
venomously anti-American line, many of my American academic friends
still defended him as an “old boy” former member of the professors’
club.

Greece was seized with a spasm of anti-British and anti-American
frenzy; our embassy in Athens was subjected to mass demonstrations,
our Information Office windows smashed and pictures of Lyndon John-
son burned. The President telephoned me almost plaintively to ask “Why
are those Greeks burning my picture?” as though he thought it a highly
personal affront. Apart from injured feelings, he worried that such
incidents might alienate the Greek-American vote in the forthcoming
November elections.

Threat of Turkish Action

On March 13, the Turkish government announced that unless fight-
ing on the island ceased, it would intervene immediately, and the United
Press news ticker reported that Inonu had given the interested nations
twenty-four hours to reply before he attacked. Meanwhile, Canada, which
offered the best hope of providing peace-keeping troops, refused to move
until assured that some other country would also contribute units. We
put Stockholm under great pressure, and right after lunch I reported to
the President that the Swedes would announce that afternoon that they
would send a force to Cyprus. The plan was to notify the Canadians,
whose parliament was meeting at 2:30, so Canadian troops could be in
the air within the next twelve hours.

With that assurance, the Turkish government withdrew its demarche .
A Finnish diplomat, Sakari S. Tuomioja, was appointed UN mediator,
and within a few days, the UN peace-keeping force seemed on the way
toward restoring order. Meanwhile, I enlisted Dean Acheson to under-
take quiet mediation, primarily between Athens and Ankara. Not only
was he a brilliantly skillful negotiator but he had personal prestige in the
two capitals because of his central role in formulating the Truman Doc-
trine when the United States first came to the defense of Greece and
Turkey in 1947. I called Acheson at his home in Washington on Febru-
ary 27; he came to lunch the following day, and I found him willing to
consider a mission that would inevitably be complex, frustrating, and of

35 ° The Johnson Years

indefinite duration. He knew the high stakes involved, because he fully
understood the importance of stability on NATO’s southern flank.

In spite of the arrival of the UN force, fighting again broke out. On
April 13, Prime Minister Papandreou of Greece mischievously announced
a campaign for self-determination for Cyprus, which would, of course,
mean turning the island over to the Greek Cypriotes. When the UN
mediator, Ambassador Tuomioja, returned in discouragement from talks
with Greek, Turkish and Cypriote leaders, Secretary-General U Thant
put forward his own peace plan. He also appointed an ex-President of
Ecuador, Galo-Plaza Lasso, to undertake direct negotiations with the
leaders of the two communities. Using the logic-chopping for which the
UN is notorious, he distinguished Galo-Plaza’s duties from those of
Tuomioja on the grounds that Galo-Plaza would seek to restore order
while Tuomioja sought a long-term solution.

Forestalling an Imminent Invasion

On Tuesday, June 2, Ruth and I were hosts at a reception for Prime
Minister Eshkol of Israel and his wife. With Secretary Rusk in New Delhi
for the funeral of Prime Minister Nehru, I was Acting Secretary. That
night we received a “critic” message from our ambassador in Ankara,
Raymond Hare, that the Turkish Security Council had decided to invade
Cyprus. Turkish forces were already deployed in the Iskenderun area
with the mission of establishing a “political and military beachhead” on
Cyprus. By such a show of force, the Turks hoped to negotiate a satis-
factory settlement.

The news came at an extremely awkward time. I was scheduled to
leave the following evening — June 4 — for a meeting with President de
Gaulle in Paris, then go on for a Cyprus discussion with the British on
Monday ending my trip at the closing sessions of the UNCTAD Confer-
ence in Geneva. Secretary Rusk returned on the morning of June 4 and
undertook to prepare a message for the President to send Inonu, which,
it was agreed, I would review before departing at 7:30 that evening.
When I saw Rusk before leaving for the airport, he showed me a draft
on which he was still working. “That,” I said, “is the most brutal diplo-
matic note I have ever seen.” Indeed, the Secretary, aided by Assistant
Secretary of State Harlan Cleveland and his deputy, Joseph Sisco, had
produced the diplomatic equivalent of an atomic bomb. “I think that
may stop Inonu from invading,” I said, “but I don’t know how we’ll ever
get him down off the ceiling after that.” The Secretary looked at me with
a sweet smile. “That’ll be your problem,” he said. The letter stated,

I wish to emphasize in fullest friendship and frankness that I do not consider
such course of action [a Cyprus invasion] by Turkey, fraught with such far-
reaching consequences, as consistent with the commitment of your government
to consult fully in advance with us. . . .

Cyprus 3 5 /

Ambassador Hare has indicated that you have postponed decision for a few
hours in order to obtain my views. I put it to you personally whether you really
believe it is appropriate for your government, in effect, to present a unilateral
decision of such consequences to an ally who has demonstrated such staunch
support over the years as has the United States for Turkey. I must, therefore,
urge you to accept the responsibility for complete consultation with the United
States before any such action is taken.

Turkish military intervention, the letter continued, would lead to a
clash with Greece. It would cause violent repercussions in the United
Nations and wreck any hope of UN assistance in settling the island cri-
sis. 1 It would “lead to the slaughter of tens of thousands of Turkish
Cypriotes.” The letter continued,

I hope you will understand that your NATO allies have not had a chance to
consider whether they have an obligation to protect Turkey against the Soviet
Union if Turkey takes a step which results in Soviet intervention, without the
full consent and understanding of its NATO allies.

And unless I can have your assurance that you will not take such action with-
out further and fullest consultation, I cannot accept your injunction to Ambas-
sador Hare of secrecy, and 1 must immediately ask for emergency meetings of
the NATO Council and the UN Security Council. . . .

We have considered you as a great ally with fundamental common interests.
Your security and prosperity have been the deep concern of the American peo-
ple, and we have expressed that concern in the most practical terms. We and
you fought together to resist the ambitions of the Communist world revolution.

I his solidarity has meant a great deal to us, and I would hope it means a great
deal to your government and your people.

We have no intention of lending any support to any solution of Cyprus which
endangers the Turkish Cypriote community. We have not been able to find a
final solution because this is, admittedly, one of the most complex problems on
earth. But I wish to assure you that we have been deeply concerned about the
interests of Turkey and the Turkish Cypriotes and will remain so.

You have your responsibilities as chief of the government of Turkey; I also
have mine as President of the United States.

You may consider that what I have said is much too severe and that we are
disregardful of Turkish interests in the Cyprus situation. I should like to assure
you this is not the case. We have exerted ourselves privately and publicly to
assure the safety of the Turkish Cypriotes and insist that a final solution of the
Cyprus problem should rest on the consent of the parties most directly con-
cerned. It is possible you feel in Ankara the United States has not been suffi-
ciently active in your behalf. But surely you know that our policy has caused the
liveliest resentment in Athens, and has led to a basic alienation between the United
States and Makarios. 2

Because this was certain to create an explosion in Ankara, I discussed
with Secretary Rusk the desirability of my going straight to Ankara, but
we agreed it would be awkward for me to break my appointment the
next day with President de Gaulle. During the night, I telephoned to

35 2 The Johnson Years

Washington once or twice from my plane to see if there had been any
second thoughts.

After a long visit with de Gaulle I went on to London for a meeting
on Monday with the British Foreign Secretary during which we dis-
cussed Cyprus, among other things. Then 1 flew to Geneva to address
the UNCTAD Conference, which was just winding up three months of
meetings with nothing accomplished. After my speech on Wednesday
night, Dean Rusk telephoned to tell me that the President was worried
about Cyprus and thought more should be done; Rusk would call me
later. I knew we had arranged for General Lemnitzer to fly to Ankara
as soon as we received the news of the impending invasion and I had
learned that, after receiving the President’s letter, Inonu had indefi-
nitely postponed the invasion. But I was worried about the wounded
state of our relations with the Turks.

Since I had been in my hotel at the time of Rusk’s first call and we
thus did not have a secure line, we could not speak freely. About 4:30
a.m., the embassy called to say that the Secretary wanted to communicate
with me on the chancery’s scrambled teletype, which was secure. For
about ninety minutes we carried on a teletype conversation. Between
exchanges, I contrived a wink or two of sleep. At the end, we concluded
that, in view of the Turks’ anger and sense of betrayal, I should go straight
away to see Inonu. Standing by was a KC-135, the tanker version of a
707, that had been fitted with what we referred to as “McNamara kits’’
(temporary berths that could be installed on eight hours notice). My staff
somehow found the pilot and at about 6:30 he came to the telex room,
where I was stretched out on a couch. I told him we were going to Ath-
ens and then on to Ankara. He looked at a map on the wall of the room
and asked rather quizzically, “Just where the hell is Athens.^” When I
queried him further, he said he thought he could find it; he and his co-
pilot did not need any further crew or supplies. We took off from Geneva
at 3:45 that afternoon and I met with Prime Minister Papandreou in
Athens at seven. I did not expect much to come from that session and
nothing did. He lacked the force to make hard decisions and the meet-
ing confirmed my belief that he would be of little use in solving the
Cyprus headache.

Still I tried hard to force him to face the reality of Greece’s predica-
ment. Cyprus had become a major threat to the peace of the world, and
Greece had considerable responsibility for what had happened. Too
much time had already been wasted. Now the matter must be settled
definitively. I told Papandreou that I had talked not only with the British
but with General de Gaulle, had taken soundings of the opinion of most
of the NATO countries, and had found everywhere “a common anxiety
to see the problem resolved rapidly.’’ I then told Papandreou of the let-
ter President Johnson had sent to Inonu, of which Papandreou had not

Cyprus 353

heard. I left little room for nuances. This time disaster had been avoided
only by the President’s forceful intervention and his adamant insistence
that there be no war between NATO allies. But, if Greece did not show
greater cooperation, we would not take such a hard line again.

Papandreou seemed old, tired, and incapable of facing reality. The
time, he maintained, was not propitious for a Cyprus settlement. That,
I said, was completely wrong. Greece, he maintained, needed a Cyprus
solution based on enosis. That, I replied, was total fantasy; Turkey would
never accept it and Turkey was not only larger and militarily stronger
than Greece but had a major logistical advantage in any conflict over
Cyprus. Papandreou then contended that the “turbulence” over Cyprus
resulted only from Turkey’s invasion threats. I told him that, though I
had heard all that before, it simply was not true. He was, I felt sure, too
well acquainted with philosophy to believe such a simplistic explanation
of a complex problem of causality. He knew better than to think that in
attacking the Turkish minority, the Greek Cypriotes were merely
responding to a fear of external intervention.

When I pressed him to undertake talks with Inonu, he shied away.
Against all the evidence, he still seemed to assume that Greece could
pursue its goal of enosis without danger of the Turks invading Cyprus,
since he apparently took it for granted that the United States would
always stand ready to thwart the Turks. Though I tried to convince him
that that was dangerous nonsense, he seemed too feeble to grasp a fresh
idea.

Before leaving, I asked Papandreou to visit President Johnson and
he accepted, but we did not discuss dates. Although I was disappointed
by his obtuseness, I did find his attitude toward Makarios more realistic.

1 he Archbishop had, I gathered, alarmed responsible Greek opinion by
his ‘flirtations with Moscow and Khrushchev.” He had, Papandreou sug-
gested, been a nuisance during the Cyprus crisis, and he implied that
the Archbishop might be excluded from any negotiations aimed at set-
tling it, which, of course, was exactly what I had in mind. Moreover,
Papandreou acknowledged that other nations besides Greece and Tur-
key had an interest in peaceful settlement; the “major powers,” he said,
“must take a hand.”

Meeting with Inonu

I left Athens late that night and arrived in Ankara about two in the
morning. Before going to bed, I was briefed by our ambassador, Ray-
mond Hare. An astute and experienced professional diplomat, he
reported a conversation with a high Turkish official who had said, “We
understand why it may have been necessary to administer a bitter pill,
but we cannot understand why it had to have a bitter coating as well.”

354 The Johnson Years

I was to meet with Foreign Minister Feridun Cemal Erkin at 9:00
a.m.; I was not looking forward to the appointment.

I liked the foreign minister; he was an experienced diplomat who
could see the problem in its larger global context, but it was his job to
express the views of his government and of the Turkish people at the
sudden freshet of ice water we had dumped on them. I did my best but
reserved my most effective arguments for Prime Minister Inonu.

Inonu received me correctly but was far more reserved than when
we had met previously. He was deeply troubled and personally hurt by
the scolding he had received from the President. I reassured him
regarding the warmth of America’s friendship for Turkey and our desire
to cooperate closely with the Turks in resolving a festering quarrel that
could result in a major war. America, I told him, was not partial to the
Greek side; indeed, we recognized that the Greek Cypriote majority had
largely created the problem by terrorizing the Turkish Cypriotes. I made
clear that we totally mistrusted Makarios. I then described in detail my
talk with Papandreou and my disappointment that I had not persuaded
him to stop calling for enosis, emphasizing the significance of what I took
to be Papandreou’s own increasing disenchantment with Makarios and
his indication that Makarios need not be included in any negotiations.
The Greek government, at long last, I said, is beginning to recognize
that Makarios is an enemy of its longer-range interests.

Prime Minister Inonu replied in measured tones; my visit, I thought,
had somewhat mollified him, and he seemed particularly interested in
what I had just told him. America’s attempt to promote a settlement
based on strong principles was, he agreed, an encouraging development,
but experience had shown that principles are sometimes abandoned when
the time comes to translate them into concrete measures. He did, how-
ever, concede that, if I were correct in my appraisal of Papandreou’s
changed attitude towards Makarios, that was one of “the hrst rays of
light in the dark situation.”

After the meeting, Inonu took me aside to say that President John-
son’s letter had, as he saw it, included “all the juridical thunderbolts that
could be assembled. As a result, of course, he committed some errors
and said some unjust things. Our foreign office will have to answer the
thunderbolts.” I interpreted this as reflecting Inonu’s desire to warn us
not to take their counter-reaction so seriously as to prejudice longer-
te/'p relations. We had unquestionably said harsh things to the Turkish
government; as a matter of self-respect, they would have to say harsh
things back. But we should not let that interfere with the friendship
essential to both of us.

I was airborne again at 12:30, and I asked the pilot to take us non-
stop to Washington, where we arrived at 5:30 that afternoon. During
the entire thirteen hours, I dictated steadily to two secretaries and, by
the time I arrived in Washington, I had a memorandum ready for the

Cyprus 355

President that not only gave a full report of my trip but recommended
that he immediately invite hrst Inonu and then Papandreou to Washing-
ton. Our only hope of a settlement now lay in bringing those two leaders
together, so that they could reach an understanding that did not involve
Makarios. If the President worked each of them over separately, we might
be able to bring that about.

I was met at Andrews Field and taken directly to the President. It
was June 1 1, 1964, when I returned to Washington. Within a few hours,
we had invited Prime Minister Inonu to visit on June 22 and Prime Min-
ister Papandreou, on June 24.

Visits of Two Prime Ministers

I he two visits took place on schedule. As I expected, the President
greatly liked Prime Minister Inonu, with whom he could talk straight-
forwardly. If the Greek leader had shown anything like the same under-
standing, serious progress could have been made. But, as I had feared,
the Papandreou visit came to little. Though we took the Greek Prime
Minister to Mount Vernon on the President’s launch, the Sequoia , and
the President, Dean Acheson, and I all pushed him hard, he remained
unresponsive. We were dealing with two old men. Though Inonu was at
the time eighty -one years old and Papandreou seventy-seven, Inonu, with
his brilliant past, seemed far the younger. Papandreou gave the appear-
ance of ffaccidity: a tired, slightly befuddled old man who could only
repeat the banal slogans he had inherited when he took office and who
seemed incapable of comprehending the larger issues.

1 he joint communique President Johnson and Prime Minister Inonu
issued on June 23 had stated that the discussions proceeded from “the
present binding effects of existing treaties.” Now Papandreou, in a press
conference, contradicted that assertion. The 1959 London- Zurich
Accords were, he said, no longer valid. Greece supported independence
for Cyprus and its right to self-determination. It would not negotiate
directly with the Turkish government because “no one is more compe-
tent to do that than the United Nations mediator.”

Acheson Tries his Hand

Although Dean Acheson had for some time been helping me review
all possible settlement plans, the time had now come to bring him directly
into the negotiations so we could have a strong, forceful, and resourceful
representative concentrating on the problem. I, therefore, suggested to
Secretary-General U I hant of the United Nations on June 26 that the
Greek and Turkish representatives be asked to meet with Acheson, who,

I said, was almost a legendary figure in Greece and Turkey.

As I feared, U Thant resisted the proposal on jurisdictional grounds,

356 The Johnson Years

since it implied that the United States might be taking the diplomatic
initiative away from the United Nations. If we were to have such a meet-
ing, it should certainly not be in America. Why not Geneva? Though I
expressed reluctance, I had already thought of Geneva as a fail-back.

But his next stipulation was not so easy to accept. It would be neces-
sary, he insisted, that UN Mediator Tuomioja, rather than Acheson, ask
the Greek and Turkish representatives to meet with him at Geneva. When
I protested that nothing could be accomplished without the presence of
American authority represented by Acheson, he conceded that Acheson
could establish himself near the site of the negotiations to be consulted
to the extent that any of the participants wished. Though I protested
that that was not a practical arrangement, U Thant showed the kind of
Burmese stubbornness I had seen on other occasions. He feared a possi-
ble Soviet charge that the United States had taken over the negotiations
and did not wish to give Makarios a basis for insisting that his govern-
ment be represented at the Geneva talks.

I reported to the President that we would probably have to make do
with this awkward improvisation; otherwise, the Secretary-General would
refuse UN sponsorship, and the Greeks would never participate. Even
in the wings, Acheson was such a strong personality that he could make
his views felt.

I then met with Prime Minister Inonu, who was at the moment at the
United Nations. As expected, he readily agreed to having the Turkish
and Greek delegates meet with Acheson in Geneva but would not com-
mit his government to refrain from a military solution if the talks should
fail. Papandreou balked as usual. He would not agree to an American
representative at the Geneva meeting. As a compromise, it was agreed
that Acheson should go to Geneva and set himself up “in the next room
or the next building” so as to be available for consultation. Papandreou
reluctantly agreed to that formula.

At my urging, President Johnson sent f urther letters to Papandreou
and Inonu, appealing to them to try to find a solution through negotia-
tions. Papandreou responded with a childish tirade against the United
States, asserting that Johnson’s letter was an “ultimatum” of the same
kind Greece had received from the Nazis in 1940. Since we espoused
the principle of self-determination, why not support that principle on
Cyprus? It was the tantrum of an excited old man out of his depth.
Though he answered with harsh, almost hysterical, words, he ended by
agreeing to send a delegate to Geneva.

Dean and Alice Acheson moved to Geneva. Before leaving, Dean
and I canvassed every possible solution for the Cyprus problem: propos-
als for partition and resettlement, federal, confederal schemes and can-
tonal schemes, and even what we came to call “double enosis” Under this
last arrangement, Greek Cypriotes would all be resettled in one part of

Cyprus 557

the island and Turkish Cypriotes in another, while each sector would
come under the sovereignty of its respective metropolitan power. Dur-
ing Acheson’s stay in Geneva, he evolved one proposal that came to be
known as the Acheson Plan. It took account of the successful population
transfers that had been carried out after the Greek-Turkish resettle-
ments in the early 1920s. It called for the union of Cyprus with Greece,
cession of the Greek Dodecanese island of Kastellorizon to Turkey,
resettlement and compensation of the Turkish Cypriotes wishing to
emigrate, the creation of two enclaves on Cyprus for Turkish Cypriotes
who wished to remain, and the establishment of a Turkish military base
on Cyprus. Neither side, however, accepted the scheme.

Meanwhile, our intelligence had reported the growing antipathy
between Makarios and General George Grivas, the famous leader of
EOKA. Though Grivas was, of course, a passionate advocate of enosis ,
he might, I thought, be easier to work with than Makarios, so we estab-
lished an underground contact with Socrates Iliades, who was Grivas’s
lieutenant and director of the defense of Cyprus. Meanwhile, Grivas
returned to Cyprus with a plan for enosis that provided protection for
the Turkish Cypriotes remaining on the island and compensation for
those wishing to leave. The fact that the Grivas Plan also called for the
ouster of Makarios enhanced its attractiveness.

These schemes were all upset when Makarios encouraged the Greek
Cypriotes to attack Turkish Cypriote villages. In retaliation, on August
7, four Turkish air force jets strafed the Cypriote town of Polis. The
next day, thirty Turkish jets Hew low over Greek Cypriote towns on the
island’s north coast. Finally, on August 9, Turkey sent sixty-four jets on
another strafing and bombing foray against northwest Cyprus. The war
was rapidly escalating.

In Washington, we set up a twenty-four-hour Cyprus command post,
and I spent the following three nights sleeping in my office. Secretary
Rusk would arrive early each morning and, in deference to his Georgian
palate, we would have hominy grits for breakfast.

On Sunday, August 12, I instructed our ambassador in Athens,
Henry Labouisse, to urge Papandreou to stop Makarios from further
assaults on Turkish Cypriotes. We should press Papandreou to abandon
“horse-trading or equivocation or passionate oratory” and act incisively
to restore peace, making clear to him that Makarios was calling for mili-
tary intervention by the Soviet Union and that it was “utterly essential”
to keep the Russians, Egyptians, and other foreign troops out of Cyprus.
At the same time, we warned Makarios that he would be publicly branded
as a murderer if his units continued to harrass the Cypriote Turks. Even
Moscow had apparently been shaken by the course events were follow-
ing, for on that same Sunday, August 12, Khrushchev sent word to Ma-
karios that, while he sympathized with the Cyprus government, a cease-

35# The Johnson Years

fire would be an “important contribution.” With the Soviets offering him
no assistance, Makarios grumpily accepted a UN call for a cease-fire,
with Turkey following suit.

Our political talks were making little progress, and on August 18,
Acheson telexed me that, in his view, the chances of obtaining a quick
Greek-Turkish settlement on Cyprus were “about the same as the odds
on Goldwater.” We should, he advised, liquidate our efforts and let him
come home, though he would continue to keep in touch with Greece
and Turkey to prevent Cyprus from being transformed “into a Russian
Mediterranean satellite.”

I urged Acheson to stay on. To “liquidate” the Geneva operations
would please Makarios and make him even more intransigent. If His
Beatitude ever decided that the United States had grown indifferent, he
would recklessly attack the Turkish Cypriotes, and the Turks would be
forced to intervene. I pointed out to Acheson that his negotiating efforts
had already yielded some useful results. They had persuaded Papan-
dreou to negotiate with Turkey and to accept a Turkish base on Cyprus;
they had even got General Grivas to consider such a base. At the same
time, they had eased some of Turkey’s initial demands.

Since there was a six-hour difference between the United States and
Geneva, I followed the practice with Acheson of talking to him around
2:00 a . m . Washington time on a scrambled teletype in the operations
center at the State Department, while he sat at the other end in the con-
sulate in Geneva. That night, after a long session of arguing over the
teletype, I ended my peroration to Acheson with “Aux armes, citoyens .” If
the Geneva enterprise must die, I contended, its burial should be con-
ducted not “by an orthodox Archbishop but by the son of an Episcopal
bishop,” which, of course, meant Acheson. Acheson had tried with great
skill and exceptional patience to settle a problem created by the wicked
and the weak. A man of rare quality, I admired him enormously, and
one of my most cherished possessions is a handwritten note commenting
on something I had written. Sent two weeks before his death, it con-
cluded with the cheering admonition: “Keep on making sense; you have
the field to yourself.”

End of the Crisis

In the end, the crisis momentarily subsided. Pressed by America and
the United Nations and denied aid by the Soviets, Makarios’s position
was weakened, particularly with General Grivas challenging his hold over
the island. A UN force was in place, and, for the time being, a precarious
peace was maintained.

That, of course, was not the end of the Cyprus story, but we had
managed to achieve a sufficient pause to permit me to turn my attention

Cyprus 359

to other matters: more and more to Vietnam, which was rapidly heading
toward all-out war. 3 Two distinguished journalists, Edward Weintal and
Charles Bartlett, writing in 1967, appraised our accomplishment as fol-
lows:

Thus, on most counts, the 1964 U.S. venture into crisis diplomacy can be
judged a success. It prevented the establishment of a Soviet satellite in the east-
ern Mediterranean. It staved off a Turkish invasion of Cyprus and, perhaps, a
full-scale war between Greece and Turkey, two NATO allies. The U.S. managed
to preserve its firm, if somewhat cooler, relations with both Greece and Turkey,
in spite of the harsh words and pressures exerted in trying to prevent conflict.
It also succeeded in avoiding increased tension with the Soviet Union.

And, more importantly, the entire enterprise was accomplished without com-
mitment of American soldiers or equipment or the expenditure of American
funds, except a pro rata share of UN peacekeeping costs. In this respect alone,
the Cyprus incident is unique in the history of U.S. crisis diplomacy. 4

Unhappy Sequel

During my years in the State Department, Secretary Rusk and I
worked on a completely alter ego basis, 5 which meant that, when Rusk
was away, he did not, as he made clear, “take the keys of his office with
him.” As Acting Secretary of State, I was in a position, when necessary,
to move incisively, with the President’s approval; Rusk established the
same ground rules with my successor, Nicholas Katzenbach.

The importance of such an arrangement was disclosed in July 1974 —
ten years after the crisis I have just described. This time, unhappily, the
United States failed to respond. Trying to run the State Department
singlehandedly from an airplane, Secretary Kissinger knew nothing about
Cyprus and did not bother to inform himself. As a result, he absent-
mindedly let the Greek junta mount a coup in Cyprus that incited a
I urkish invasion. When the Turks swarmed across the island, the Nixon
Administration — under pressure from the Greek lobby — stopped arms
shipments to Turkey and alienated the eastern anchor of our southern
flank defense. As of this writing, 36 percent of Cyprus, including the
most attractive tourist areas, remains under occupation by the Turkish
army. Greece and Turkey are at sword’s point and both are on uneasy
terms with the United States and NATO. Makarios is dead, and the par-
tition that might have solved Cyprus’s problems has now been achieved
by force and in a manner tragically unfair to the Greek Cypriotes.

I he moral is clear: effective diplomacy for a great nation requires a
constant high-quality institutional vigilance. That is not possible when all
decisions are preempted by an individual virtuoso with a lust for travel.

PART VII

The Vietnam
Aberration

14 . Victnam-Thc Initial Error

In the day-to-day work of the State Department, Dean Rusk
exercised — subject to the President’s judgment — the final decision over
the whole of our foreign policy. He paid particular attention to devel-
opments in the Far East, for he had devoted a large part of his military
and diplomatic career to Asian affairs. As a colonel in the army during
the Second World War, he had been responsible for military planning
in the CBI (China-Burma-India) theater. During the early months of the
Korean War, he had been the Assistant Secretary of State for Far East-
ern Affairs and had effectively helped shape political-military strategy
during that dismal conflict.

My own areas of experience were quite different. Except for govern-
ment tours during the early New Deal days and during World War II, I
had been a private lawyer, primarily concerned with European matters.
Though I had favored United States intervention to rescue South Korea
from invasion by a Soviet-influenced North Korea, I was appalled when
our reckless push to the edge of Manchuria precipitated a massive
Chinese response. General Douglas Mac Arthur’s insistence, in April 1951,
that we invade China seemed totally irresponsible, and I applauded when
Truman dismissed his insubordinate general. 1

If I had no part in the Korean War, I knew substantially more than
most of my new colleagues about France’s unhappy experience in
Indochina and had thought it lunacy when Vice-President Nixon sug-
gested in April 1954 that we might “put American boys in.’’ The fact
that Eisenhower disregarded this particular bit of Dulles-Nixon non-
sense improved my opinion of his sagacity. General Matthew Ridgway’s
eloquent protests against involvement made him one of my heroes, which
he has remained to this day. Through my work with the French govern-

Vietnam — The Initial Error 361

ment I had listened to innumerable French military and civilian experts
discuss their nation’s plans, fears, and doubts and shared vicariously in
my French friends’ agony over Dien Bien Phu. From that experience, I
concluded — and have never ceased to believe — that we should rigor-
ously avoid land wars in Asia.

The Laotian Operetta

Given this background, it never occurred to me in 1961 that a land
war in Asia would again become America’s major preoccupation, and I
paid small attention to the curtain-raiser for the macabre drama of Viet-
nam — a piece of Graustarkian opera bouffe in Laos. During the pre-
inaugural interregnum, President-elect Kennedy had asked me for a
memorandum on developments in that little-known land. With the help
of Jeff Kitchen, then Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-
Military Affairs, I had evolved a descriptive document that at least iden-
tihed the players — without always defining the positions they were play-
ing, which were, to say the least, both fluid and ambiguous. The Laotian
war had its special flavor — one might almost say its charm. Proceeding
with the pace and gentility of a cricket match, it was periodically inter-
rupted so both sides could join in water festivals.

President John Kennedy, during his first months in office, spent long
hours on the exotic disturbances in Laos — primarily because just before
the inauguration, Eisenhower had told him that Laos was the key to all
Southeast Asia. Once they had taken Laos, the Communists, he said,
could bring “unbelievable pressure” on Thailand, Cambodia, and South
Vietnam. If the situation reached the point where other countries could
not be persuaded to act with us, we should be willing “as a last desperate
hope, to intervene unilaterally.” 2 Kennedy’s interest in Laos was no doubt
further stimulated by the natural desire of all new Presidents to show
their skill at statecraft. Laos was at that time the only game in town — the
only genuine shooting war, even though little actual shooting was ever
heard.

To me, Laos and Vietnam were all part of the Southeast Asian drama
that had begun long before. Refusing to sign the 1954 settlements that
made possible the French withdrawal, Secretary John Foster Dulles had
then preempted the French role. With his addiction for formalistic paper
solutions, he had devised the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization
(SEATO) — a so-called mutual security arrangement that included the
United States, Great Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand as well
as three Asian states: Thailand, Pakistan, and the Philippines. By a sup-
plementary protocol, the signatory states of SEATO pledged themselves
to protect three nonsignatory nations: South Vietnam, Cambodia, and
Laos. Through Dulles’s astigmatic vision, Laos loomed large as a “bul-

362 The Vietnam Aberration

wark against Communism” and a “bastion of freedom,” and by the end
of i960, we had provided the Laotian government with nearly $300
million, of which 85 percent was to help build an army. 3

Not much of an army was built, however, for the Laotian generals
and civilian bureaucrats concentrated on stealing the new wealth. That
left a Viet Minh-directed group, the Pathet Lao, to establish a firm hold
on the villages and countryside. Old friendships and family played a
role; the leader of the Pathet Lao, Prince Souphanouvong, was closely
tied to Ho Chi Minh, while the regular government of Laos in Vientiane
was headed by his half-brother, Souvanna Phouma. In October 1957*
the two half-brothers negotiated the so-called Vientiane Agreements,
which provided for a neutralized Laos under a coalition government —
with the Pathet Lao represented in both the army and the cabinet.

That infuriated Dulles, who thought coalitions with Communists a
halfway house to perdition, so he made use of his own family ties by
persuading his brother, CIA Chief, Allen W. Dulles, to force out Prince
Souphanouvong and replace him with a politician bearing the even more
unlikely name of Phoui Sananikone. Then the CIA conjured up from
France a Laotian military officer named General Phoumi Nosavan; six-
teen months later, Phoumi overthrew Phoui (which could have been
either a significant event or a typographical error). Five months after
that, Souphanouvong escaped from jail to the North, and the Pathet Lao
resumed the civil war.

Phoumi in turn was displaced by a young paratroop captain, Kong
Le, who seized power and asked Prince Souvanna to form a new govern-
ment that, as before, would be neutralist. Meanwhile, the Defense
Department continued to whoop it up for Phoumi, who, with American
encouragement, took the Royal Laotian Army to Savannakhet in Sep-
tember i960, where he proclaimed a new government and denounced
Souvanna. Washington promptly responded by sending him American
military aid, though continuing to give economic assistance to the Sou-
vanna government in Vientiane. Then, in December, shortly after the
American elections, Phoumi marched on Vientiane. Souvanna fled to
Cambodia, where he made a deal with Souphanouvong. Kong Le, pru-
dently taking along a huge store of American supplies, joined the Pathet
Lao. That ended the first act of a preposterous long-running serial that,
more than anything else, resembled a Kung Fu movie.

Advent of the Kennedy Administration

After Kennedy was inaugurated, America changed its policy. By
reacting with horror to a neutralist government, the Eisenhower Admin-
istration had driven the neutralists into an alliance with the Communists
and provoked Soviet aid to the Pathet Lao. Under our new dispensation,
neutralism would no longer be equated with evil, and we would stop

Vietnam — The Initial Error 365

trying to prop up Phoumi as the savior of a non-Communist Laos, par-
ticularly since his army was far more adept at stealing than fighting.

Every morning, at the Secretary of State’s staff meeting, I listened to
fearsome reports of the bloody battles on the Plaine des Jarres— a pla-
teau on which large prehistoric stone jars had been found. But in spite
of blood-curdling reports of valor, violence, and gore, that strategic ter-
rain was largely untouched by blood. Though charming for their inno-
cent mendacity, the fabricated communiques quickly became boring from
a monotonous lack of verisimilitude. Since Phoumi’s army, though
incompetent as a fighting force, was unexcelled in fast retreat, the Plaine
des Jarres was soon occupied by the Pathet Lao, to whom the Soviets
were now shipping more and more ammunition.

The problem faced by President Kennedy foreshadowed in minia-
ture the predicament that would haunt his successor: how to extricate
America from an overcommitment. Extrication was not recommended
by the professorial warriors on the White House staff. Walt Rostow, for
example, pressed for moving twenty-five thousand American troops into
the Mekong Valley to deter the Pathet Lao and provide a bargaining
counter for an international conference. But believing that it made no
sense to tie up our armed forces in Laos, the President urged the British
to reintroduce an earlier plan for an International Control Commission
and to call a Geneva conference once the fighting in Laos had ended.
He also warned the Soviets of the danger of a collision if they continued
to support the Pathet Lao and opposed the creation of a neutral Laos.
To back up that threat, we sailed the Seventh Fleet into the South China
Sea, alei ted combat troops in Okinawa, and moved five hundred marines
with helicopters into Thailand.

I do not know what might have developed had White House atten-
tion not then been deflected by the Bay of Pigs. Though Rostow, sup-
ported by Harriman, still urged a limited commitment of American
troops in the Mekong Valley, that idea fortunately lost favor at the high-
est level. Meanwhile, my own attitude toward Laos remained that of a
skeptical eavesdropper. Preoccupied with more significant and interest-
ing responsibilities, I did not regard Laos as an urgent problem.

Background of Vietnam

A quip current in prewar Europe was that, though the situation in
Germany was serious but not hopeless, the situation in Austria was hope-
less but not serious. 1 he Laotian situation was clearly in this latter cate-
gory. I he situation in Vietnam was more serious, but in my view, quite
as hopeless. I knew Indochina’s recent history better than most. In spite
of our doctrinal commitment to anticolonialism, our European ties and
our anti-Communist fervor had led us to support the French against Ho
Chi Minh because he was accepting help from Moscow and Peking and

364 The Vietnam Aberration

proclaiming Marxist principles. Then, in 1954, after the French were
defeated at Dien Bien Phu, a tired French government had made peace
at Geneva and extricated France from the mess.

Despite the fact that the 1954 Geneva Accords gave Ho Chi Minh
control over the northern part of Vietnam above the Seventeenth Par-
allel, the “final declaration” of the conference explicitly stated that “the
military demarcation line [was] provisional and should not in any way be
interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary.” Indeed,
the Accords left the issue of the unification of Vietnam to be settled by
free general elections supervised by an International Commission. Those
elections were to be held before July 20, 1956.

Inevitably, the two sides interpreted those provisions to suit their
own interests. To Ho Chi Minh and company, the Accords were merely
a resting point in their ultimate drive to expel Western influence from
the whole of Vietnam. It seems unlikely they put much faith in the con-
templated election; they were prepared to wait, regroup, and ultimately
take over the whole country by force or subversion. The Eisenhower
Administration was determined not to let that happen. Secretary Dulles
had been revolted by the armistice agreement that ceded even part of
the country to the “godless Communists.” Flaunting his anti-Marxist
purity, he refused to look across the conference table toward Ho Chi
Minh and departed, prior to the settlement, leaving Under Secretary of
State Walter Bedell Smith, to sweep up as best he could.

During the following two years, the Diem regime’s refusal to take
even the first step in arranging the modalities for a free election was fully
supported not only by Secretary Dulles but also by Senator John F. Ken-
nedy. In June 1956, Kennedy had exhorted America to oppose the elec-
tions, as “obviously stacked and subverted in advance.” Then, echoing
the domino theory, in one of his more purple passages, he had emptied
a whole bagfull of well-worn metaphors. Vietnam, he insisted, repre-
sented “the cornerstone of the free world in Southeast Asia, the keystone
to the arch, the finger in the dike. Burma, Thailand, India, Japan, the
Philippines and obviously Laos and Cambodia are among those whose
security would be threatened if the red tide of Communism overflowed
into Vietnam.” Vietnam was, he asserted, not only “a proving ground
for democracy in Asia,” but “a test of American responsibility and deter-
mination in Asia” since “. . . if we are not the parents of little Vietnam,
then surely we are the godparents. We presided at its birth, we gave
assistance to its life, we helped to shape its future. ’ 4

Americas Involvement Begins

By the time he became President four years later, Kennedy had tem-
pered his language. The Viet Cong, with help from Hanoi, had achieved

Vietnam — The Initial Error 365

domination over large sections of the country, and our rhetoric was being
put to the test. On October 1, 1961, Premier Diem called on the United
States for a bilateral defense treaty; on October 13, he asked for United
States combat troops and a substantial amount of equipment. President
Kennedy responded by sending a fact-finding mission to Vietnam headed
by General Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow, both White House advis-
ers.

The inclusion of Rostow worried me. A friend of mine since the Sec-
ond World War, he was an articulate amateur tactician. I thought him
unduly fascinated by the then faddish theories about counter-insur-
gency and that intriguing new invention of the professors, “nation build-
ing.” Still, Maxwell Taylor’s presence was reassuring. Though I then
knew him only slightly, I had a favorable impression of his judgment.
He talked with an elegance unexpected in a soldier, and he looked exactly
as a general should: clean-cut, scholarly, handsome, and resolute. In the
past he had, at least ambiguously, expressed aversion to the involvement
of American forces on the Asian mainland, so I hoped he might be
another Matthew Ridgway. Yet, as I knew from experience with my
French friends, there was something about Vietnam that seduced the
toughest military minds into fantasy.

The Taylor -Rostow Report

At this time, the United States maintained in South Vietnam an
advisory group of about seven hundred men (roughly the limit provided
by the 1954 Geneva Accords). Now General Taylor cabled from Saigon
in early November 1961 that we should introduce a military force into
South Vietnam to raise national morale, perform logistical tasks “in sup-
port of military and flood relief operations,” conduct combat operations
necessary for self-defense and for security of the area in which it was
stationed, provide emergency reserves to back up the Vietnamese armed
forces “in the case of a heightened military crisis,” and “act as an advance
party of such additional forces as may be introduced.”

Such United States troops, the general noted, might “be called upon
to engage in combat to protect themselves, their working parties, and
the area in which they live. As a general reserve, they might be thrown
into action (with U.S. agreement) against large, formed guerrilla bands
which have abandoned the forests for attacks on major targets.” Con-
trary to the later experience of thousands of young Americans, Taylor
also asserted that, “as an area for the operations of U.S. troops, SVN
(South Vietnam) is not an excessively difficult or unpleasant place to
operate.” 5

One of the more memorable statements in the report was that “the
risks of backing into a major Asian war by way of SVN are present but

5 66 The Vietnam Aberration

. . . not impressive,” since, among other things, North Vietnam was
“extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing.” That vulnerability,
according to Taylor and Rostow, was “a weakness which should be
exploited diplomatically in convincing Hanoi to lay off SVN.” 6 Though
the initial size of our force should not exceed about eight thousand, the
report emphasized that the initiative should “not be undertaken unless
we are prepared to deal with any escalation the Communists might choose
to impose.” 7

A Critical Meeting

On Saturday morning, November 4, 1961, I attended a meeting with
General Taylor in Secretary Rusk’s conference room. Secretary McNa-
mara, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, and a few oth-
ers were also present. McNamara and Gilpatric, who were invariably
prompt, arrived in advance of the general, and I talked with them about
the Taylor proposals. I was, I said, appalled at the report’s recommen-
dations; we must not commit forces to South Vietnam or we would find
ourselves in a protracted conflict far more serious than Korea. The Viet
Cong were mean and tough, as the French had learned to their sorrow,
and there was always danger of provoking Chinese intervention as we
had in Korea. Moreover, I said, unlike Korea, the Vietnam problem was
not one of repelling overt invasion but of mixing ourselves up in a rev-
olutionary situation with strong anticolonialist overtones.

To my dismay, I found no sympathy for these views. Both McNa-
mara and Gilpatric seemed preoccupied with the single question, How
can the United States stop South Vietnam from a Viet Cong takeover?
How did I propose to avoid it? The “falling domino” theory was a brood-
ing omnipresence.

Conversation with the President

I was depressed by the direction af fairs were taking, so at the end of
a meeting on another subject the following Tuesday, November 7, I raised
the question with President Kennedy. I told him that I strongly opposed
the recommendations of the Rostow mission. To commit American forces
to South Vietnam would, in my view, be a tragic error. Once that process
started, I said, there would be no end to it. “Within five years we’ll have
three hundred thousand men in the paddies and jungles and never find
them again. That was the French experience. Vietnam is the worst pos-
sible terrain both from a physical and political point of view.” To my
surprise, the President seemed quite unwilling to discuss the matter,
responding with an overtone of asperity: “George, you’re just crazier
than hell. That just isn’t going to happen.”

Vietnam — The Initial Error 367

Since then, I have pondered many times as to just what President
Kennedy was trying to tell me. His statement could be interpreted two
ways: either he was convinced that events would so evolve as not to require
escalation, or he was determined not to permit such escalation to occur.
But, why had he answered so abruptly — which was not his normal man-
ner? Could it be that he hated to admit even to himself that he shared
some of my apprehensions? I can provide no answers to those questions.

I know no more than anyone else what would have happened to our
Vietnam venture had President Kennedy not been killed. Historians have
speculated for years as to how the face of the world might have been
changed had Good King Wenceslaus looked out on a thaw, or Alexander
not caught the fever in Babylon, or what agonies America might have
been saved during Reconstruction had John Wilkes Booth not bred his
fatal shots. Some historians have adduced bits of evidence to show that
President Kennedy had reserved in his own mind the possibility of with-
drawal. But I venture no opinion. Such speculation is inherently sterile;
there are no answers in the back of the book.

I left the White House in a mood of dark f utility. Back in my office
I said to Bob Schaetzel, then my chief of staff, “We’re heading hell-bent
into a mess, and there’s not a Goddamn thing I can do about it. Either
everybody else is crazy or I am.” I was badly positioned for a fight. Polit-
ical and military problems in Vietnam were not within the purview of
the Under Secretary for Economic Affairs and my appointment as the
Under Secretary (now known as the Deputy Secretary) — of which I was
then unaware — would not formally be made until two weeks later, on
November 26, 1961. For the moment, my voice carried little resonance.

I saw no point in pursuing my convictions, since whatever doubts and
fears President Kennedy may have had about adventuring in Vietnam,
he was clearly not about to impart to me.

First Steps Down the Primrose Path

On November 8, Secretary McNamara reported to the President that
he, Gilpatric, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had reached conclusions
essentially supporting the Taylor-Rostow recommendations. 8 Though
McNamara conceded that the struggle might be prolonged and Hanoi
and Peking might intervene, he still thought we could assume that “the
maximum United States forces required on the ground in Southeast Asia”
would “not exceed six divisions, or about 205,000 men.” 9 Finally, he
noted that, despite the fact that “the domestic political implications of
accepting the objectives are also grave ... it is our feeling that the coun-
try will respond better to a firm initial position than to courses of action
that lead us in only gradually, and that in the meantime are sure to
involve casualties.” 10

3 68 The Vietnam Aberration

Dean Rusk, I knew, had serious reservations about the commitment
of American combat forces. Given the nature of the struggle, he recog-
nized that the political factor was fully as important — if not more so —
than the military. But he did not want to get crosswise with McNamara.
He never forgot that during a long period when Secretary of State Dean
Acheson and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson were not on speaking
terms, the machinery for reaching decisions had worked creakily, and
he would not let that happen. Thus, no difference of view between the
Pentagon and Foggy Bottom was ever likely to surface publicly.

Moreover, both Rusk and McNamara believed that they should,
without compromising their convictions, try to present the President with
a common view, or, at least narrow the range of options by seeking to
harmonize their opinions, thus saving the President from difficult choices.
That practice could be, and in my judgment often was, overdone; on the
whole, it tended to discourage expressions of doubt that might have
induced greater caution. As the man ultimately responsible, the Presi-
dent should never be spared the necessity, often painful, of deciding
between the conflicting opinions of his advisers. President Johnson would
sometimes have been better served, as I saw it, had his principal cabinet
members fought out their divergent views in his presence, rather than
trying to compromise them in advance. The adversary process was, in
our common law tradition, the best engine for adducing the truth. Pre-
senting him with agreed recommendations or listing the available options
in a memorandum did not adequately concentrate the mind; any expe-
rienced bureaucrat knew how to present such options to encourage the
decision he wanted.

But compromise had become a habit, and the two Secretaries now
applied it. On November 1 1, they submitted a joint memorandum that
reflected not only their own views but also their discussions with the
President. It watered down the recommendations in the original
McNamara-Gilpatric-Joint-Chiefs memorandum, by distinguishing two
categories of military involvement: “Units of modest size” for the direct
support of the SVN military effort (such as communication equipment,
helicopters, reconnaissance aircraft, naval patrols, and intelligence units)
should be “introduced as speedily as possible”; but no such precipitate
action was proposed for the second type of commitment: larger orga-
nized units that would “greatly increase the probabilities of Communist
bloc escalation.” 11

Our Commitment to Win

Such watering-down merely slowed the process. What most dis-
turbed me was the rejection of any turning back, the declaration of an
irrevocable policy with its implication of a mind-set that could — and did —

Vietnam — The Initial Error 369

lead to unimaginable death and disaster. It had the sound and solemnity
of a religious oath: “We now take the decision to commit ourselves to
the objective of preventing the fall of South Vietnam to Communism . . .
in doing so, we recognize that the introduction of United States and
other SEATO forces may be necessary to achieve this objective.” Mean-
while, the Defense Department was directed to prepare plans “for the
use of United States forces” for several purposes including dealing “with
the situation if there is organized Communist military intervention.” 12

Within weeks we had sent almost seventeen hundred men to Viet-
nam and more were to follow. 13 That meant that the balloon was going
up, and although it was not climbing as rapidly as some of my more
belligerent colleagues would have liked, I had no doubt it was headed
for the stratosphere. I did not have even a fragile hold on the guide
ropes; the President had made that quite clear by his uncharacteristically
sharp rebuff.

From my notes — and the recollections of those then working closely
with me — I estimate that although my cabinet-level colleagues were
becoming increasingly obsessed with Vietnam during the last eighteen
months of the Kennedy Administration, I did not devote more that 5 to
10 percent of my time to that subject. I had shifted my attention to urgent
problems in other areas of the world, where I could make my influence
effectively felt.

The Deception of Number

There were, as was normal in any protracted struggle, brief seasons
when our Vietnam aficionados had smiles on their faces. On his first visit
to Vietnam, in 1962, Secretary McNamara reported to the President that
“every quantitative measurement we have shows we are winning the
war” — a comment that illustrated his instinctive fondness for assessing
problems in quantitative terms. He was a superb Secretary of Defense —
brilliantly skilled in planning, budgeting, devising and administering
efficient procurement policies, and controlling all aspects of a great,
sprawling part-military, part-civilian department. But the very quanti-
tative discipline that he used with such effect as Secretary of Defense did
not always serve him well as Secretary of War. Though he tried at the
outset in 1961 to be realistic about the inherent difficulty of the struggle
and the risks of its enlargement, he could not help thinking that because
the resources commanded by the United States were greater than those
of North Vietnam by a factor of X, we could inevitably prevail if we only
applied those resources effectively — which is what our government
frantically sought to do for the next ten years.

The quintessential advantage of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong
could not, however, be expressed in numbers or percentages. It was the

5 jo The Vietnam Aberration

incomparable benefit of superior elan , of an intensity of spirit com-
pounded by the elemental revolutionary drives of nationalism and anti-
colonialism. So, with the unquantifiable omitted from the McNamara
equation, the answer never came out right. As the war ground on,
McNamara grew increasingly uneasy and unhappy, and I thought it
largely because experience was undercutting his most deeply held prem-
ise of a quantitative rationale. In time, he began to hate the war and
desperately wished for a negotiated settlement. But he could only think
in terms of a settlement that conceded little and hence would inevitably
be viewed by the other side as a demand for capitulation.

Inadequacy of the Diem Regime

Meanwhile, we were rapidly discovering that the tiger we were back-
ing in Vietnam was more a Tammany tiger than a disciple of Thomas
Jefferson. Kenneth Galbraith, who had visited Saigon at the President’s
request, had told me in unambiguous terms that Diem was an insur-
mountable obstacle to success, and I had had the same word from some
of my press friends. Now, beginning with Diem’s treatment of the
Buddhist problem toward the middle of 1963, I became increasingly
convinced that we had tied our nation’s fortunes to a weak, third-rate
bigot with little support in the countryside and not much even in Saigon.

For some time, the Diem regime had been heading toward a disrup-
tive collision with the Buddhist clergy. During a demonstration in May,
Vietnamese soldiers killed nine Buddhists; then, in protest against Diem,
a monk, Quang Due, poured gasoline over his head and burned himself
to death on a crowded Saigon street while other bonzes formed a circle
around him. By the end of October, there had been seven fiery bonze
suicides.

The Buddhist dispute revealed with alarming clarity the degree to
which Diem had succumbed to the malign spell of his brother, Ngo Dinh
Nhu, and, particularly, Nhu’s vicious and vindictive wife — whose talent
for repulsive comments was unparalleled. “The government,’’ she said,
should “ignore the bonzes, so if they burn thirty we shall go ahead and
clap our hands.’’ Later she referred, with excruciating black humor, to
the “bonze barbecue.’’ 14

In August, Nhu engineered a midnight raid against the Buddhist
pagodas. Intelligence reports increasingly identified him and his wife
with the Communists, and I thought it likely that the Nhus were delib-
erately trying to destroy the Saigon government to advance their own
personal power. How could we hope to fight a successful war when Diem
was under such poisonous influence? How could the United States con-
tinue to identify itself with a regime that behaved with such brutality
and crass disregard of world sensitivities?

Vietnam — The Initial Error 37/

The Coup Telegram

All this came into sharp focus on Saturday, August 24, 1963. Week-
ends for Rusk and me were normally indistinguishable from weekdays;
but since everything seemed quiet, U. Alexis Johnson and I left in the
late afternoon for a rare golf game (I was able to play only four times in
my six years in the State Department). We had time for only nine holes,
and as we came up on the ninth green (where I made my only good
approach shot of the day), I found Averell Harriman (then Under Sec-
retary of State for Political Affairs) and Roger Hilsman (then the Assis-
tant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs) waiting for me to finish my game.
The four of us drove back to my house.

Averell brought me up to the minute on the Vietnam cable traffic
and showed me a proposed telegram he and Hilsman wished to send to
Cabot Lodge, our new ambassador in Saigon. It was drafted in response
to a telegram from Lodge reporting coup feelers from certain of Diem’s
top generals and was obviously explosive. As I am sure Averell expected,
I declined to send it without the President’s clearance. Its main theme
was that our government could no longer tolerate a “situation in which
power lies in the Nhus’ hands.” 15

The draft telegram authorized Lodge, subject to his objections, to
make clear to Diem that the United States could not accept continued
brutal actions by the Nhus against the Buddhists and that the situation
must be promptly redressed. At the same time, Lodge should tell the
key military leaders that, unless the Nhus were removed from the scene,
the United States would find it impossible to continue its assistance. Then
came the key sentence: “We wish to give Diem reasonable opportunity
to remove the Nhus, but if he remains obdurate, then we are prepared
to accept the obvious implication that we can no longer support Diem.” 16

I did not object to the telegram except to improve the drafting. I had
thought for some time that we could not retain our self-respect as a
nation so long as we supinely accepted the Nhus’ noxious activities.
Encouraging coups, of course, ran counter to the grain of America’s
principles but Diem’s legitimacy was dubious at best; we had in effect
created him in the first place. Now the Nhus were destroying what little
moral justification remained for our position in Vietnam. The decision,
however, was not mine but the President’s, so I telephoned him in Hyan-
nis Port to bring him up to date and read him the relevant passages. The
President on the whole seemed favorable to our proposed message,
although he recognized the risk that, if a coup occurred, we might not
like Diem’s successor any better than Diem himself. But finally he said,
“If Rusk and Gilpatric agree, George, then go ahead.”

Within a few minutes, I reached Rusk in New York and told him of
the proposed telegram and of my talk with the President. He was cau-

37 2 The Vietnam Aberration

tious but made it clear that, if the President understood the implications,
he would give a green light. Soon a message arrived that Gilpatric was
also in accord. To be fair to him, he was, I suspect, heavily influenced by
both Rusk’s and the President’s approval. If they were fully prepared to
accept the risks, he would support them. Richard Helms, then deputy
head of the CIA (presumably speaking for his chief, John McCone, who
was unreachable) expressed accord with our message. General Maxwell
Taylor, who was dining at a restaurant, could not be reached, though
his deputy, General Victor Krulak, gave his approval and Taylor, on
seeing the telegram after it had been sent, expressed no disagreement.

In retrospect, I think we should have waited until the question could
have been fully discussed in a well-prepared meeting, but since Harri-
man and Hilsman insisted that Lodge needed a prompt answer, I signed
off on the telegram. The next day (Sunday) Lodge cabled requesting
permission to go directly to the generals, without first telling Diem. It
would, he argued, be unwise to ask Diem to remove the Nhus; he would
not do so and our approach would alert him that something was up and
give him time “to block or forestall action by the military.” Instead, he
proposed to tell the generals that “we are prepared to have Diem with-
out Nhus but it is in effect up to them whether to keep him .” 17 Here
again I probably made at least a tactical mistake. The record would cer-
tainly have been better had we first put the issue directly to Diem, mak-
ing it clear that we would withdraw our support for his regime if he did
not remove the Nhus. But that, I thought, would accomplish little, since
if he called our bluff — as he almost certainly would — I doubted my col-
leagues would ever carry through with a threat of withdrawal! At the
same time, our continued support of Diem while the Nhus kept on with
their repulsive activities was, in my view, impossible to contemplate. It
put America in an odious position quite inconsistent with the principles
on which we had based our Vietnam intervention in the first place. So I
approved a telegram authorizing this change in procedures, which I
cleared with Mike Forrestal, who was acting for a briefly absent Mac
Bundy.

Monday, August 26 , was a day of second thoughts. In particular,
John McCone, back at his desk, protested that we should never have
given the generals such a laissez-passer to undertake a coup; Secretary
McNamara and Maxwell Taylor agreed. Even the President showed some
misgivings that we had acted so quickly, although I thought him equally
annoyed by the waffling of his top command. I held my ground, con-
tending that the telegram was essential in view of the evil influence of
the Nhus, but no one else dashed forward to accept responsibility for it.

Two days later, I left to visit Prime Minister Salazar and to see Pres-
ident Ayub Khan. On the same day, a telegram from Lodge, in response
to the President’s request for an expression of his “independent judg-

Vietnam — The Initial Error 573

ment,” seemed to accept fully the course of action we had laid down.
“We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turn-
ing back: the overthrow of the Diem government. There is no turning
back in part because U. S. prestige is already publicly committed to this
end in large measure and will become more so as the facts leak out. In a
more fundamental sense, there is no turning back because there is no pos-
sibility , in my view , that the war can be won under a Diem administration. ...”
(Italics added.) 18

But the message in our August 24 telegram proved a damp squib.
The generals got cold feet, asking their CIA contact, Colonel Lou Conein,
for clearer evidence that the United States would not betray their plot.
Meanwhile, Ambassador Lodge authorized the CIA to “assist in tactical
planning” for the coup, although General Paul Harkins thought we
should try first to persuade Diem to get rid of his brother. When
Ambassador Lodge categorically rejected that idea, the President, show-
ing deference to the political sagacity of an ex-Senator he had once
defeated, came down on Lodge’s side.

President Kennedy now publicly put heat on Diem, announcing on
September 2, 1963, that the Diem regime would have “to take steps to
bring back popular support” if the war were to be won and that success
was possible only “with changes in policy and perhaps with personnel.” 19
Robert Kennedy was urging that Lodge be instructed to get rid of Diem.
Since, in the Washington tradition, a fact-finding mission can serve as
a substitute for a policy, the President sent McNamara and General Tay-
lor to make a first-hand appraisal of the situation. The mission returned
with a report filled with the contradictions that betrayed personal uncer-
tainty. Though optimistic about our military prospects (McNamara
announced that one thousand American troops would be out by Christ-
mas and that America would be able to terminate its major commitment
by 1965), the mission’s report still emphasized the unpopularity of the
Diem government and recommended the continued search for “alter-
native leadership.” Lodge, meanwhile, was authorized to use our aid
program as leverage to bring about the changes he thought necessary,
and this was angrily denounced by the Diem regime. The rest of the
story is well known. Early in October, we learned that a coup was on
again, but in view of the failure to move in August, the reaction was one
of dubiety and caution. When a coup finally occurred on November 1,
it was a messy affair and Diem was killed.

Because our deep involvement in Vietnam was such a ghastly error,
a thousand myths have been spun to explain our failure. Nixon blamed
our inability to prevent the final debacle on the United States Congress;
Kissinger blamed it on Nixon and Watergate. The fiercest hawks claim
we could have won had we permitted our air force to bomb everything
in sight or, better yet, had sent our armies marching on Hanoi. Then

374 The Vietnam Aberration

there is the large club of the unreconstructed, who — seeking an excuse
for preordained failure — seize on the August 24 telegram as an excul-
pation. Had that telegram not been sent, they contend, Diem would have
remained in charge; we would have won the war; and everyone would
have lived happily ever after.

Myths are made to solace those who find reality distasteful and, if
some find such fantasy comforting, so be it. From the outset, I believed
that we could never win the war and I do not believe for a moment that
we could have won it had Diem not been overthrown. As Ambassador
Lodge pointed out at the time, we could not possibly win “under a Diem
Administration.” The Nhus were poisonous connivers, and America
could not, with any shadow of honor, have continued to support a regime
that was destroying Vietnamese society by its murderous repression of
the Buddhists.

Thus I would have lost no sleep over the August 24 telegram even
had it triggered the coup, but the evidence suggests it had little, if any-
thing, to do with it. When Ambassador Lodge and I testified together
before a Congressional subcommittee in 1975, he made the following
statement with regard to that telegram: “. . . in the Pentagon Papers they
don’t put in the fact that it was cancelled a week later, and they give the
impression that when the actual coup did come on November 1, it was
under the provisions of that telegram. . . . When the coup did come it
was a thoroughly, to use Mr. Ball’s phrase, a thoroughly indigenous
operation, Vietnamese in origin and Vietnamese in every respect.” 20

Only a little more time was left for President Kennedy. Twenty-two
days after the coup he himself was murdered, leaving the unresolved
problems of Vietnam for President Johnson. We were — as was increas-
ingly obvious — moving closer and closer to a deep involvement in the
Vietnamese war. Instead of a handful of Americans in Vietnam, there
were now more than 16,000. President Kennedy, though anxious to avoid
any irrevocable commitments, had still made them. He had said at a
press conference on July 17, 1963, ‘‘We are not going to withdraw from
that effort. In my opinion, for us to withdraw from that effort would
mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam, but Southeast Asia. So we
are going to stay there.” His acceptance of the Taylor-Rostow report
had set in train a process of escalation with clear recognition that it might
involve increasing troop commitments. The theoretical limit had been
set at 205,000 men.

President Johnson Takes Over

President Johnson, in my own view, was as anxious as Kennedy to
avoid an irreversible embroilment. At every stage, he moved reluc-
tantly — pushed by events and the well-meant prodding of the same men

Vietnam — The Initial Error 575

who counseled President Kennedy. In proposing new escalatory mea-
sures, his inherited advisers were, in turn, responding to successive dis-
appointments that led them to flail around frenetically in pursuit of an
elusive — and, as I saw it, illusory — solution.

A determined President might at any point have overruled his advis-
ers and accepted the costs of withdrawal, but only a leader supremely
sure of himself could make that decision; Lyndon Johnson, out of his
element in the Vietnam War, felt no such certainty. Not only had his
long Senate experience left him untrained in the discipline of rigorous
analysis and surgical decision required to break the momentum, but Far
Eastern quarrels were far from his first priority. The tragedy for Lyn-
don Johnson — and for America — was that our ill-conceived involvement
in Vietnam prevented him from applying his full energies to the reali-
zation of his vision of equality and well-being for America. Instead, he
found himself committing an increasingly large portion of his time,
thought, and energy to a war half a world away, for which he was wholly
unprepared.

His tragedy was not unique. I remember once reading that when
Woodrow Wilson was leaving Princeton en route to his inauguration, he
remarked to Professor E. G. Conklin that all his life he had been prepar-
ing for the domestic problems facing our country and that “it would be
the irony of fate if [his] administration had to deal chiefly with foreign
affairs.” That Lyndon Johnson, as Wilson before him, had to deal with
foreign affairs in the intense form of a war was not only “the irony of
fate” but catastrophic bad luck. He resented the whole idea of the war
but was swept along by a momentum others had set in motion. In the
end, the war drove him from the Presidency.

In a totally rational world, Lyndon Johnson might have devoted his
early weeks in office to a critical look at all the assumptions of our Viet-
nam position, but he had other things to think about. Initially preoccu-
pied with securing the passage of President Kennedy’s legislative
programs, he left the war largely in the hands of those who took its
prosecution for granted. Meanwhile, pressures built up. South Vietnam
showed itself quite unable to put down the Viet Cong insurgency, and
there were increasing signs of demoralization and corruption in Saigon.

I had been present when President Johnson met with Ambassador
Cabot Lodge at the time of the Kennedy funeral, and in the beginning
of June 1964, they met again in Honolulu. Lodge strongly argued for
the prompt beginning of a bombing offensive to bolster morale in South
Vietnam; General Maxwell Taylor opposed further escalation until we
had installed a government in Saigon that we could be sure would not
sell us out. It was an absurdly constricted framework in which to try to
resolve the major issues of the war, yet even that narrow issue was never
settled, nor any clearcut decision made. The momentum of events car-

3j6 The Vietnam Aberration

ried us constantly forward, and, so long as no one challenged the fun-
damental assumptions on which our involvement rested, events, not
design, would determine the future.

Refusal to Ask the Giraffe Question

Although I dislike trite metaphors, I felt as though an accelerating
current were propelling us faster and faster toward a gigantic waterfall.
Yet no one was questioning the navigation, only how to rev up the engines
to make the ship run faster. “How?” was the obsessive question. How
could we apply the vast power at our command to impose our will on
the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong? I recalled the story of a small
boy at the zoo whose father had pointed out a large caged animal and
announced: “See, that’s a giraffe” — to which the boy had very sensibly
answered: “Why?”

To ask the “giraffe” question, now that we were getting into increas-
ingly deep trouble, was regarded as almost subversive. No one was pre-
pared to discuss why we persisted in a war that, in my view, we could not
win, in pursuit of an objective that seemed every day to have less reality.
Men with minds trained to be critical within the four walls of their own
disciplines — to accept no proposition without adequate proof — shed their
critical habits and abjured the hard question “why.” Once they caught
hold of the levers of power in Washington, they all too frequently sub-
ordinated objectivity to the exhilaration of working those levers and
watching things happen. The lessons of history, to my surprise, were
disdained. It was useless for me to point out the meaning of the French
experience; they thought that experience without relevance. Unlike the
French, we were not pursuing colonialist objectives but nobly waging
war to support a beleaguered people. Besides, we were not a second-
class nation trying to hang on in Southeast Asia from sheer nostalgic
inertia; we were a superpower — with all that that implied.

Disparate frames of reference beclouded understanding. For Hanoi’s
leaders, control of the whole of Vietnam was a fanatical, almost religious,
objective they had relentlessly pursued for twenty years; for America,
the war was a marginal affair not worth a head-on clash with Peking or
Moscow, a struggle to be waged with a limited commitment of man-
power and weaponry. Thus President Johnson ruled out such provoca-
tive acts as mining Haiphong Harbor, or blowing up the dikes, or
bombing the city center of Hanoi, or mounting a land invasion of North
Vietnam; nor did anyone even consider the use of nuclear weapons. The
conflict was a limited war for limited objectives — a type of warfare for
which a democracy is organically badly suited.

For me, that built-in disparity of commitment raised fundamental
questions. Not only did we suffer the implicit disadvantage of waging

Vietnam — The Initial Error 377

limited war against an adversary committed to total war, there was also
the question whether America, as a democratic state, could fight a lim-
ited war that lasted more than a year or so and still keep it limited. A
free people would accept sustained sacrifices only if persuaded that the
cause justified their deprivations. If the answer were No, we ought to
withdraw; if Yes, were we not then obligated to use our full military
might? That problem haunted me.

During the early months of the Johnson Administration, I was
occupied with many things: Cyprus, East-West trade, the political impli-
cations of satellite communications, the Kennedy Round of trade nego-
tiations, turbulence in Panama, wool and beef imports, political issues
with Brazil, and the UNCTAD Conference. Vietnam was for me only an
increasingly worrisome and distasteful affair peripheral to my principal
concerns. Nonetheless, I attended meetings with the President, con-
ducted routine business with Secretary McNamara relating to the war,
and watched the recurrent Saigon coups that hatched out obscure mili-
tary leaders with the political life span of June bugs who fluttered briefly
in the limelight only to disappear. Each time a change occurred, I enjoyed
a sweet, brief moment of hope that it would result in so much chaos as
to make our withdrawal imperative.

Yet as the months passed, my conviction deepened that unless we
promptly extricated ourselves, we would, sooner or later, find our coun-
try engaged in a large-scale, messy shooting war — an American version
of France’s guerre sale. Among all the top command, I found President
Johnson the most reluctant to expand America’s involvement. He was
wary, among other things, of repeating Mac Arthur’s error of attacking
too close to the Chinese border; he did not want American boys to have
to fight the Chinese hordes again. Yet the failure of our efforts in the
South tended more and more to strengthen the hand of those who, in
default of other tactical alternatives, were agitating for bombing attacks
on the North.

“Vietnam Is Rotten Country”

At the beginning of June 1964, while considering moves that would
intensify the American involvement, the President asked me to discuss
Vietnam with President de Gaulle. My selection for that mission was no
accident; in Lyndon Johnson’s mind, the very fact that I opposed the
war made me the best advocate of the Administration’s position. He knew
that, as long as I remained in the government, I would defend govern-
ment policies, whatever they might be. The President understood and
respected my commitment to that position though he liked to tease me
about it. “George,” he once told me, “you’re like the school teacher look-
ing for a job with a small school district in Texas. When asked by the

37# The Vietnam Aberration

school board whether he believed that the world was flat or round, he
replied: ‘Oh, I can teach it either way.’ ” “That’s you,’’ said the President.
“You can argue like hell with me against a position, but I know outside
this room you’re going to support me. You can teach it flat or round.’’

President de Gaulle received me in the splendor of the Elysee Palace
with his customary friendly greeting. I told the French President that,
although both our governments wanted a viable South Vietnam, the
government of Saigon seemed unable to stop the North Vietnamese and
Vietcong invasion. Within a reasonable time, the United States might
itself have to take action against the North, even though that might, at
some point, engage the Chinese forces. Naturally we wanted a diplo-
matic solution, but the South was so fragile that even talk of negotiations
might lead to its collapse and a quick Vietcong victory. We, however, did
not believe in negotiating until our position on the battlefield was so
strong that our adversaries might make the requisite concessions. Thus
before serious talks, we would have to teach the Vietnamese a lesson
and, in the process, persuade the Chinese also of our strength. China, as
we saw it, was not unlike the Soviet Union in 1917: primitive and
aggressive toward its neighbors.

De Gaulle, as I had anticipated, rejected my analysis categorically.
China, he told me, was nothing like the Soviet Union in 1917; it lacked
the military, industrial, and intellectual resources that Russia had even
at that time. Thus, it would not become aggressive until after it had
consolidated its power, which would require a long period. We were
pursuing the same illusions about Vietnam that had gotten France into
such trouble. It would, of course, be nice if we were right, but he knew
something about Vietnam: it was a hopeless place to fight. He, therefore,
felt obliged to tell me that the United States could not win, even though
we commanded vastly more resources than France had been able to
mobilize. The more power we committed, the more the population would
turn against us. We would never succeed by force, only by negotiation.

I riposted with the -established Administration line that South Viet-
nam would never understand a negotiating move at this time, but inter-
pret it as a sign of American weakness. But de Gaulle did not let me get
far down that course, interrupting to say that our position in Vietnam
was hopeless and France would not involve itself in any way in the esca-
lation of the fighting. We would have to go it alone. Vietnam, he said —
and I shall never forget the phrase — is “rotten country.’’ France had
learned that to its sorrow.

Since de Gaulle’s views supported what I had been arguing to my
colleagues, I hoped they would reinforce my position, but when I
returned from Europe, I found Lyndon Johnson unimpressed, or at
least unwilling to listen, as he was then preoccupied with strengthening
his domestic flanks. As a seasoned politician, he had concluded that if

Vietnam — The Initial Error 379

there were to be a major escalation of the war, he must make sure of
having Congress behind him. Thus he would seize the earliest opportu-
nity to obtain a Congressional mandate for a greater involvement. That
opportunity came very promptly.

Tonkin Gulf Charade

During this period, I was aware that we were conducting covert mil-
itary operations under the code name Operation Plan 34A. They were
part of a strategy of mounting “progressively escalating pressure” on
Hanoi by what President Johnson liked to call “noncommitting mea-
sures,’’ and they included the dispatching of PT boats to bombard North
Vietnamese coastal installations. During this same period (February and
March 1964), the navy had begun an exercise under the code name of
De Soto Patrol, which consisted of sending destroyers up the Gulf of
Tonkin with the ostensible mission of collecting intelligence on such
matters as radars and coastal defenses. On August 2, 1964, while the
destroyer Maddox was heading south after completing such a mission,
North Vietnamese PT boats made a run at her.

Though some of the President’s advisers urged an immediate retal-
iatory move, the President wished for an even stronger record. So, rather
than keeping our ships out of this now established danger zone, the
President approved sending both the Maddox and the destroyer C. Turner
Joy back into the Gulf. I was upset by this decision; the argument that
we had to “show the flag” and demonstrate that we did not “intend to
back down” seemed to me a hollow bravado. Thus I was disturbed but
not surprised on August 4, 1964, when word came that both destroyers
had been attacked. The North Vietnamese may well have thought that
the De Soto Patrols were part of the 34A raids and were merely trying
to defend the coast by attacking the destroyers. Moreover, there was some
evidence that the commanders might have misread the radar blips; if
the destroyers were in danger, it could have been because they were
firing at one another. Within the next two or three days, even President
Johnson began to doubt the occurrence of a second attack. With disgust
he said to me at one point, “Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just
shooting at flying fish!”

1 thought we would now stop risking our destroyers, but immediately
following the presumed second attack, Secretary McNamara proposed a
further De Soto Patrol to show the flag and prove to Hanoi and the
world that we were not intimidated. The project was briefly discussed;
there was general agreement around the table; the President indicated
his approval to go forward. I had said little during the discussion, but I
now spoke up, “Mr. President, I urge you not to make that decision.
Suppose one of those destroyers is sunk with several hundred men

3 8 o The Vietnam Aberration

aboard. Inevitably, there’ll be a Congressional investigation. What would
your defense be? Everyone knows the De Soto Patrols have no intelli-
gence mission that couldn’t be accomplished just as well by planes or
small boats at far less risk. The evidence will strongly suggest that you
sent those ships up the Gulf only to provoke attack so we could retaliate.
Just think what Congress and the press would do with that! They’d say
you deliberately used American boys as decoy ducks and that you threw
away lives just so you’d have an excuse to bomb. Mr. President, you
couldn’t live with that.”

No one spoke for a long moment. The President seemed discon-
certed and confused. Then he turned to McNamara: “We won’t go ahead
with it, Bob. Let’s put it on the shelf.”

Beginning of the Rearguard Action

The Tonkin Gulf attack — or attacks, however many there may have
been — provided the President with enough leverage to extract from
Congress almost unlimited authority to escalate our involvement. The
Tonkin Gulf Resolution (a terrifyingly open-ended grant of power) dis-
appointed me; I had counted on Congress to insert qualifying language,
but Congress had abdicated. I did not know where we were headed, but
it was clear the war was getting out of hand. So, toward the end of Sep-
tember 1964, I began work on a memorandum to focus attention on the
“giraffe” question by challenging every major assumption underlying
our Vietnam policies. Since my days were fully occupied with Cyprus,
Europe, and other areas, I dictated most of it into a tape recorder at
home late in the night. The subject matter was too sensitive to permit
me to draw on the normal resources of the Department. Only my prin-
cipal assistant, George Springsteen, and two or three secretaries were
fully aware of what I was doing. I finally finished the sixty-seven-page
(single-spaced) memorandum on October 5, 1964.

The paper began by noting that the political situation in Saigon was
“progressively deteriorating” and there was no serious possibility of a
government that could “provide a solid center around which the broad
support of the Vietnamese people” could coalesce or that “could conduct
military operations with sufficient effectiveness to clean up the insur-
gency.” Thus, we had four options.

• We could continue along current lines, recognizing that at some
point we should either be thrown out by a neutralist coup in Saigon or
be forced to a deeper involvement “by the manifest hopelessness of the
present course of action.”

•We could take over the war by injecting substantial United States
ground forces, but in that event “our situation would, in the world’s eyes,
approach that of France in the 1950s.”

Vietnam — The Initial Error 381

• We could mount an air offensive against the North to improve our
bargaining position for negotiation. But though preferable to a ground
force commitment, that would lead to the same result by provoking the
North Vietnamese to send ground forces to the South that could be
effectively countered only by United States ground forces.

• Finally, we might try to bring about a political settlement without
direct US military involvement that would check, or at least delay, the
extension of Communist power into South Vietnam.

We must discard the assumption that Vietnam presented the same
problems that we faced in Korea. We had fought in South Korea under
a United Nations mandate. Unlike the situation in South Korea, the South
Vietnamese government lacked the general support of the principal ele-
ments in the country. The Korean War started only two years after
Korean independence, when the people were still exhilarated by free-
dom: “The people of South Vietnam have been fighting for almost
twenty-two years and are tired of conflict.” Finally, the Korean War had
begun with a massive land invasion by one hundred thousand troops
across an established border; in South Vietnam, there had been no
invasion, only a slow infiltration that many nations regarded as an
“internal rebellion.”

We urgently needed to compare the relative costs and risks of inten-
sifying the war with the costs and risks of “a carefully devised course of
action designed to lead to a political solution under the best conditions
obtainable.” I quoted General Taylor’s statement that if the government
in Saigon should “continue to crumble, air action against North Vietnam
would, at best, bring a Pyrrhic victory.” No one, I wrote, had yet shown
that United States action against the North would create political cohe-
siveness in Saigon. Nor could we assume that bombing the North would
persuade the Hanoi government to stop helping the Viet Cong. So long
as our adversaries saw the prospect of ultimate victory, they would accept
“very substantial costs from United States air action.” Nor was there any
reason to believe that we would be in a position to deal with the North
Vietnamese more effectively after an air offensive. That was “based on
a wrong assessment of the political impact of such a course worldwide
and its effect on our bargaining strength.”

We were misjudging not only the political consequences of bombing
but also the military consequences. Sustained bombing would trigger a
“major invasion of South Vietnam by North Vietnamese forces.” (That
was, of course, exactly what later did happen.) North Vietnam would
“choose to fight the kind of war best adapted to its resources.” If we were
to use air power, in which we had an unquestioned advantage, the North
Vietnamese would “retaliate by using ground forces, which they possess
in overwhelming numbers.” Our intelligence estimates were that in two

382 The Vietnam Aberration

months time North Vietnam could put roughly sixty thousand men across
the DMZ and through the Panhandle.

Increased infiltration from North Vietnam would require substantial
American ground units to defend our bases. That would put us in the
position of France in the early 1950s — with all the disastrous political
consequences of such a posture.

It was a mistake to assume that we could launch a military attack
against North Vietnam and still “control the risk” or that we “could halt
the process of escalation whenever we [felt we had] accomplished our
objective or the enemy was about to respond with unexpected force.” It
is, I wrote — and this was perhaps the most important passage in the
memorandum — “in the nature of escalation . . . that each move passes
the option to the other side, while, at the same time, the party which
seems to be losing will be tempted to keep raising the ante. To the extent
that the response to a move can be controlled, that move is probably
ineffective. If the move is effective, it may not be possible to control — or
accurately anticipate — the response.” 1 insisted that “Once on the tiger’s
back, we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount.”

I then came to the heart of the matter. It was a mistake to believe
that we had to “stop the extension of Communist power into South Viet-
nam if our promises were to have any credence.” Attorney General Rob-
ert Kennedy had, I noted, even gone so far as to say in Germany that “if
Americans did not stop Communism in South Vietnam, how could peo-
ple believe that we would stop it in Berlin?” That was not only dangerous
talk but far from the truth. Our allies believed that we were “engaged in
a fruitless struggle in South Vietnam” and feared that if we became too
deeply involved “in a war on the land mass of Asia,” we would lose inter-
est in their problems. What we had most to fear was “a general loss of
confidence in American judgment that could result if we pursued a course
which many regarded as neither prudent nor necessary. . . . What we
might gain by establishing the steadfastness of our commitments, we
could lose by an erosion of confidence in our judgment.” I then reviewed
the probable reactions of each individual country of Southeast Asia to
differing courses of action. I also discussed the reactions of other nations
of the Third World, most of which, I thought, would favor a political
solution, but would “strongly oppose an air offensive against North Viet-
nam.”

Finally, I came back to the central point. We had originally commit-
ted ourselves to continue to help South Vietnam only “so long as the
Vietnamese people wish us to help” and so long as they maintained an
adequate standard of performance. Why not then serve notice on the
South Vietnamese Council that we would continue the struggle only if
the South Vietnamese government and people achieved unity of pur-
pose? Such notice might conceivably “pull together the responsible ele-

Vietnam — The Initial Error 383

ments of the country” and even lead “to the creation of a unified
government.” But it was far more likely that Saigon would regard it as a
warning “of ultimate United States disengagement.” That would, I pre-
dicted, “almost certainly accelerate existing covert probing of the possi-
bilities of a deal with the Viet Cong elements” — which in my view would
be a good thing.

I did not try to do more than outline the possibilities of settlement,
offering my memorandum “not as a definitive document but as a chal-
lenge to the assumptions of our current Vietnam policy.”

Reaction to Heresy

1 had devoted long nights to preparing this analysis because we were
at a critical turning point. We could still get out easily; we still had only
a few more forces in Vietnam than at the time of President Kennedy’s
death; and we had not yet launched a systematic air offensive against the
North. But there was an unmistakable smell of escalation in the air; the
military situation in the South was fast deteriorating, the Viet Cong were
extending their territorial control, and the leadership of the so-called
government in Saigon was rotating among various cliques of military
grafters.

My colleagues in Washington and our Saigon embassy were standing
logic on its head. What we charitably referred to as a government in
Saigon was falling apart, yet we had to bomb the North as a form of
political therapy. That was as absurd as Candide’s account of hanging
admirals pour encourager les autres. Such a tortuous argument was the
product of despair — the last resort of those who believed we could not
withdraw from Vietnam without humiliation. (We seemed more con-
cerned about “loss of face” than did the Orientals.) They still tenaciously
believed that we did not dare negotiate until we had so battered the
North that any settlement talks would concern only the terms of Hanoi’s
capitulation — which was out of the question.

When I completed the memorandum, I sent it to Secretary McNa-
mara, Mac Bundy, and Secretary Rusk. Bob McNamara in particular
seemed shocked that anyone would challenge the verities in such an
abrupt and unvarnished manner and implied that I had been imprudent
in putting such doubts on paper. My colleagues seemed somewhat more
concerned with a possible leak than with the cogency of what I had writ-
ten. We agreed, however, to meet and discuss the specific points in the
memorandum, reserving two Saturdays for that purpose. But it required
only one meeting, which took place on Saturday, November 7, 1964, to
convince me that there was no point in carrying the argument further.
My colleagues were dead set against the views I presented and uninter-
ested in the point-by-point discussion I had hoped to provoke. They

384 The Vietnam Aberration

regarded me with benign tolerance; to them, my memorandum seemed
merely an idiosyncratic diversion from the only relevant problem: how
to win the war.

Piecemeal Attack

For a short period, I pursued the piecemeal tactic of trying to slow
escalation by resisting each new escalatory project. But I could be effec-
tive only if I kept my heretical views within a limited circle. To negate
any impression of dissent among the top hierarchy, President Johnson
announced that he would refer to me as the “devil’s advocate,” thus pro-
viding an explanation for anyone outside the government who might
hear that I was opposing our Vietnam policy. Though that ruse pro-
tected me, I was irked when some academic writers later implied that
my long-sustained effort to extricate us from Vietnam was merely a styl-
ized exercise by an in-house “devil’s advocate.” Thus are myths made.
Not one of my colleagues ever had the slightest doubt about the intensity
of my personal convictions. The devil, God knows, had plenty of law-
yers; he was doing too well to need my services.

I hesitated for some weeks before bringing my long memorandum
to the President’s attention. If I were to ask him, Mac Bundy would, I
knew, give it to Lyndon Johnson; he was scrupulously fair in such mat-
ters. But the President was then engaged in his election campaign and
was troubled with a thousand problems. It did not seem a propitious
time for a confrontation, so I decided to wait until I could get his full
attention.

I was free to pick my timing. Dean Rusk had told me early in our
relationship that the President was as entitled to my views as to his — a
magnanimity that has haunted me ever since. In his book The Best and
the Brightest, David Halberstam reports a member of the Administration
as saying, “I cannot imagine McNamara letting Ball dissent like that if
Ball were his deputy. Nor, for that matter, can I imagine George letting
Rusk dissent if Ball had been Secretary and Rusk Under Secretary.” 21
How can I be sure of the answer? Dean Rusk, a man of extraordinary
integrity and selflessness, was quite prepared to let me urge views con-
trary to his, but I am by no means sure that under similar circumstances
I would have been so tolerant or generous.

Somehow, word that I had filed some kind of dissent reached the
ears of the columnist Joseph Alsop. On November 23, he wrote, “Ball’s
knowledge of Asia could be comfortably contained in a fairly small thim-
ble.” I responded in a note to him that he had inaccurately appraised
my resources. “You’ve got the receptacle wrong. My knowledge of Asia
should not be thought of as contained in a thimble but a soup plate; it is
at once both wider and more shallow than you suggest.” According to

The Balloon Rises Quickly 385

Alsop, my thesis that our Vietnamese embroilment was damaging Amer-
ican prestige in Europe ignored the fact “that a gigantic United States
failure in Vietnam will virtually give the European game to General
Charles de Gaulle.”

That, I thought, was about as far off base as one could get.

If. The Balloon Rises Quickly

If I were to persuade the President to halt the escalation and
seek a way out of the war, I would have to convince Lyndon Johnson
that no matter how much force we committed we could not win, that our
deeper involvement would expose us to risks of a wider war with the
possible intervention of the major Communist powers, and that the costs
of extrication were less than the costs and risks of proceeding. We des-
perately needed to stop, look, listen, and think before the momentum of
events carried us deeply into the Slough of Despond called Vietnam.

Our Changing War Aims

I was clear about my objectives but how could I achieve them? We
had first justified our involvement in the war by the so-called “domino
theory”: if South Vietnam fell to Hanoi, all Southeast Asia would pass
under the domination of North Vietnam. Since my colleagues thought
Hanoi a surrogate of Moscow and Peking, a North Vietnamese triumph
would dangerously extend the reach of the major Communist powers.
Lyndon Johnson had flamboyantly embraced that theory as early as May
1961, when, as Vice-President, he visited Vietnam. The issue for Amer-
icans was, he had announced, “whether we are to help these countries to
the best of our ability or throw in the towel in the area and pull back our
defenses to San Francisco.” 1

At the time, I was neither disturbed nor impressed, writing off such
hyperbole as the natural exuberance of a Texan reinforced by years in
the Senate. It was not a position to be held by one with serious respon-
sibility for policy, and when Johnson became President, the South Viet-
namese army’s persistent failures and our own repeated disappointments
forced a tacit reappraisal. As early as the middle of 1964, the domino
theory had largely vaporized under the scorching sunlight of reality. 2
But, as so often happens in international affairs, my colleagues were
slow to adjust theory to reality — or, if they did, failed to put their doubts
and second thoughts into words. Thus not until January 1966, would
John McNaughton, McNamara’s most trusted adviser on the war, spell

3 86 The Vietnam Aberration

out the new rationale that had until then evolved without explicit expres-
sion. “The reasons why we went into Vietnam to the present depth are
varied; but they are now largely academic. Why we have not withdrawn
is, by all odds, one reason ... to preserve our reputation as a guarantor.”
“The present U.S. objective in Vietnam,” so MacNaughton wrote, “is to
avoid humiliation.” 3

Our new rationale for staying in Vietnam became, as Jonathan Schell
has perceptively written, not to protect the United States from a military
danger, but a “psychological domino theory.” According to the original
domino theory, so Schell points out, “each nation that fell to Commu-
nism would endanger its immediate neighbor.” Now

according to the psychological domino theory, the ill effects of a nation’s fall
would not necessarily be on neighboring nations, but would be on nations all
over the world which, by merely watching the spectacle, would lose confidence
in the power of the United States. ... In this thinking, Vietnam became a “test
case” of the United States’ will to use its power in world affairs. If the United
States could not muster the “determination” to prevail in Vietnam, it was believed,
then it would be showing, once and for all, that it lacked the determination to
prevail in any conflict anywhere. And, since in the official view credibility was
indivisible, a collapse in credibility in the sphere of limited conflict would cast
doubt on the credibility of American power in other spheres of competition as
well, including even the all-important nuclear sphere. Thus according to the
doctrine of credibility, the United States was engaged in a global public relations
struggle in which a reverse in any part of the world, no matter how small, could
undermine the whole structure of American power . 4

Schell s observations accurately describe the underlying attitude of
the Johnson Administration. As was the case with so much doctrinal
thought, logic was stretched too far and facile analogies accepted too
uncritically. Credibility was not “indivisible”; other nations and peoples,
as I constantly argued, easily distinguished between our involvement in
Vietnam and our commitment to defend Berlin. The idea that the two
were in any way comparable was a conceit invented at the top reaches of
our government to justify what they wanted to do anyway.

Unhappily, the shift of rationale from the domino theory to the psy-
chological domino theory committed us even more firmly to a war aim
we could never achieve. If, under the original domino theory, all we
sought to preserve was the integrity of neighboring states from North
Vietnamese aggression, we might fall back on building a defense line in
Thailand. But once the war aim was formulated in public relations terms,
we were compelled to continue a struggle we could not win. By clinging
dogmatically to the belief that saving “our reputation as a guarantor”
meant forcing Hanoi to capitulate, we locked ourselves into a prison with
no exit. The North Vietnamese would never agree to any settlement that
did not offer them a virtual certainty of gaining domination of the whole

The Balloon Rises Quickly 387

of Vietnam within a reasonable time frame. That was the major point I
incessantly argued with no success.

I told my colleagues they were proving George Santayana’s aphorism
that “fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have for-
gotten your aim .” 5 The Administration had, I contended, not so much
“forgotten its aim” as discarded it for an aim that was deceptive. To fight
a war at what seemed limitless cost just because we could not easily get
out was quite unworthy of a great nation — particularly because, I was
convinced, my colleagues greatly overestimated the costs of a carefully
programmed extrication.

Rejection of a Cease-Fire in Place

Because we failed to adjust our war aims to what was now tacitly
regarded as our true objective — to save our reputation — doctrine decreed
that we must never agree to a cease-fire in place, which would leave
North Vietnamese forces in the South. Our avowed war aim was to restore
the Saigon government’s sovereignty over the whole of South Vietnam
and our failure to achieve it would impair our reputation as a guarantor.
Nor should we agree to a coalition government that would permit the
North Vietnamese apparatchiks a beachhead from which they could
quickly subvert and overwhelm the softer South Vietnamese elements —
a prediction that implied a vote of no confidence in the Saigon hier-
archy.

Since we had now reduced our reasons for continuing to struggle in
Vietnam to the simple objective of saving ourselves from humiliation —
in other words, preserving our reputation — we should have concen-
trated on a simple question: How can we withdraw from Vietnam with
the least loss of face? The indispensable first step was to free ourselves
from subservience to whatever regime might at the time be in power in
South Vietnam. We could never achieve terms that would satisfy the
Saigon government; its war aims were rigidly defined by the desire of
those in power to keep their jobs. We were constantly on the verge, as I
kept pointing out, of becoming a “puppet of our puppet.”

Need to Regain Freedom of Action

Our first problem was to reposition ourselves so we could negotiate
bilaterally with North Vietnam to secure the return of our prisoners and
the peaceful withdrawal of our forces. That required that we demon-
strate what was every day more obvious: the South Vietnamese were not
fulfilling their part of the bargain. I he Saigon government was corrupt
and without firm national roots. It could never meet the standards laid
down by President Eisenhower as conditions for our aid. Once we insisted

3 88 The Vietnam Aberration

on those conditions, Saigon’s rulers would most likely turn their backs
on us, thus freeing us of further responsibility.

There was no time to spare; each new escalatory step was complicat-
ing the problem of ultimate extrication. On November 1, 1964, just two
days before the American Presidential election, the Viet Cong launched
a mortar barrage attack on American planes and facilities at Bien Hoa
airfield near Saigon, killing four Americans and destroying five B-57
bombers. Instead of retaliating on election day, the President appointed
an interagency working group under the chairmanship of William Bundy,
the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, to develop polit-
ical and military options for direct action against North Vietnam.

Working groups of seasoned bureaucrats deliberately control the
outcome of a study assignment by recommending three choices, exploit-
ing what we referred to as “the Goldilocks Principle.” By including with
their favored choice one “too soft” and one “too hard,” they assure that
the powers deciding the issue will almost invariably opt for the one “just
right.” In this case, Option C, the “just right” option, which both
McNaughton and Bundy favored, involved gradually increasing air
strikes “against infiltration centers, first in Laos and then in the DRV
and then against other targets in North Vietnam” so as to “give the
impression of a steady, deliberate approach . . . designed to give the
United States the option at any time to proceed or not, or to escalate or
not, and quicken the pace or not.” 6

Meanwhile, I had prepared a paper of my own, dated November 7,
which proposed that we ask the United Kingdom to try to persuade Mos-
cow to bring Peking and Hanoi to a conference to which the United
Kingdom would, on its side, bring the United States and South Vietnam.
At the same time, the United States, together with the United Kingdom
and other friendly nations, would call for a cease-fire and the disarming
of the Viet Cong. I was under no illusion that such a proposal would be
accepted; it was intended primarily to gain time. Though everyone lis-
tened politely, the committee reviewing the working group proposals
was interested in only one question — how to escalate the war until the
North Vietnamese were ready to quit. I need hardly mention that I was
alone in favoring the mildest of the three options.

A day or two later, I left for Europe to attend a ministerial meeting
of the OECD. During my absence, the committee, influenced by General
Maxwell Taylor, who was now our ambassador to Vietnam, reached a
compromise recommendation for a two-phase program: thirty days of
air strikes at infiltration routes, coastal raids, and some reprisal raids
against the North; then a sustained air offensive in which the bombing
would be gradually intensified. Ambassador Taylor hoped that he could
use the promise of this bombing offensive to obtain a commitment from
the South Vietnamese government to pull itself together; he feared that

The Balloon Rises Quickly 389

we might be sold out overnight by the tawdry military cabals that chased
one another around the revolving door leading to control in Saigon.

When I returned from Europe, I found the President again more
cautious than his advisers. Agreeing only to the first phase of the revised
Bundy committee program, he conditioned the beginning of phase two
on Saigon government reforms, and, of course, the placemen momen-
tarily holding power in Saigon did promise reform. They always did, but
the half-life of such promises was, as I predicted, numbered in hours.
Wilfully flouting our conditions, they dissolved the High National Coun-
cil and made night arrests of their political opponents, making sure that
Saigon’s fetid air would never be diluted by even a slight whiff of
democracy. Although Ambassador Taylor gave the junta a dressing down
that was, some thought, offensively brash, he still urged Washington to
begin the bombing campaign. That annoyed President Johnson, who
was understandably reluctant to venture further onto the Vietnamese
quicksand without a firm political base in Saigon.

I have always marveled at the way ingenious men can, when they
wish, turn logic upside down, and I was not surprised when my col-
leagues interpreted the crumbling of the South Vietnamese govern-
ment, the Viet Cong’s increasing success, and a series of defeats of South
Vietnamese units not as proving that we should cut our losses and get
out, but rather that we must promptly begin bombing to stiffen the
resolve of the corrupt South Vietnamese government. It was classical
bureaucratic casuistry. A faulty rationalization was improvised to obscure
the painful reality that America could arrest the galloping deterioration
of its position only by the surgery of extrication. Gifted dialecticians car-
ried the charade one step further, arguing that we were principally
responsible for Saigon’s low morale, since Ambassador Taylor had upset
Saigon’s politicians by demanding that the government shape up in a
manner it had no intention of doing. We must, they argued, commit our
power and prestige even more intensely to stop the South Vietnamese
government from falling completely apart, negotiating covertly with the
Liberation Front or Hanoi, and ultimately asking us to leave. It was Catch
22 and the quintessence of black humor. Almost alone, the President
seemed to recognize and reject this inversion of logic.

Bombing of North Vietnam Begins

On February 7, 1965, the Viet Cong attacked the American barracks
at Pleiku. Their mortar fire killed eight Americans and wounded more
than sixty. The demand for prompt retaliation was overwhelming and I
realized that further frontal opposition would be not only futile but tac-
tically unwise. I could gain nothing by antagonizing my colleagues if the
President could no longer be deterred. That point became even clearer

39° The Vietnam Aberration

when Cyrus Vance telephoned Mac Bundy, who was then in Saigon con-
ferring with Taylor and Westmoreland. Should we now begin the air
strikes? The answer of the Saigon team was loudly affirmative.

Mac Bundy’s recommendations followed the then prevailing view that
we needed to bomb not in order to punish Hanoi but to pump adrenalin
into the South Vietnamese. “If the United States and the Government
of Vietnam join in a policy of reprisal, there will be a sharp immediate
increase in optimism in the South. . . .” 7 The hope that such action would
affect “the will of Hanoi . . was, he suggested, only a secondary objec-
tive — “an important but longer-range purpose.’’

Faced with a unanimous view, I saw no option but to go along, al-
though I did try one filibustering tactic, countering McNamara’s insis-
tence on immediate bombing with the argument that we should at least
postpone the action until after Kosygin, who was momentarily in Hanoi,
had left the country. I was supported by Senator Mike Mansfield, the
Senate majority leader, whom the President had invited to what he knew
would be a critical meeting. Mansfield had developed an interest in the
Far East when assigned there as a young Marine in the early 1920s and
had later taught Far Eastern history; thus his voice carried special
authority. Vice-President Hubert Humphrey also raised a cautionary
voice against bombing during the Kosygin visit, while Ambassador Llew-
ellyn Thompson pointed out that the Soviet Union would almost cer-
tainly think we had chosen this moment to bomb in order to humiliate
Moscow.

Bob McNamara brushed these caveats aside. I was, he protested,
trying to block our retaliatory raid, not merely postpone it (which, in
fact, was true). There would never be a perfect moment to begin bomb-
ing; someone could always find an objection and time was of the essence.
We had to show immediately that we were reacting to the Vietcong attack.
It was the quintessential McNamara approach. Once he had made up
his mind to go forward, he would push aside the most formidable
impediment that might threaten to slow down or deflect him from his
determined course. So, once again, he carried the day. Not only did the
President come down on McNamara’s side but he was so annoyed at
Hubert Humphrey’s cautionary words that the Vice-President was
thereafter excluded from our meetings for many months.

Agreed Forecast

With the Administration committing itself to dangerously mounting
escalation, I shifted my tactics to try to gain my colleagues’ agreement to
a forecast of future dangers, giving the President in early February a
memorandum reflecting a collective view that would show him some of
the mine fields we would be risking. I worked closely with Ambassador

The Balloon Rises Quickly 391

Llewellyn Thompson in preparing the paper, then reviewed it with
McNamara and McGeorge Bundy. (Secretary Rusk was unavailable.) The
memorandum, as it finally evolved, stated that “except for the major
differences in positions set forth ... it can be taken as representing the
generally agreed views of all four of us.”

Reflecting our intelligence reports, the paper pointed out that as we
moved the bombing line closer and closer to Hanoi, we would invite an
engagement with the fifty-three Chinese MIGs that Peking had sent to
defend North Vietnam. We would then be under pressure to bomb the
major MIG base at Phuc Yen, near Hanoi. That would probably, at some
point, induce Hanoi to send south perhaps as many as 125,000 troops.
If we attacked above the Nineteenth Parallel, Peking would be under
pressure to intervene with aircraft operating from Chinese bases, which
would, in turn, lead to pressure to knock out offending Chinese bases.
China might then move massive ground forces into North Vietnam and,
subsequently, into other parts of Southeast Asia. We could halt them
only by introducing five to eight United States divisions with a total troop
strength of 300,000 men.

All this was, I thought, generally agreed among the four of us —
McNamara, Bundy, 1 hompson, and me — except for certain specific
points of difference:

McNamara-Bundy Position

McNamara and Bundy believe that vve must pursue a course of increasing
military pressure to the point where Hanoi is prepared to agree not only to stop
infiltration from the North, but effectively to call off the insurgency in the South
and withdraw those elements inhlt rated in the past. To achieve this objective,
they would accept the risks of substantial escalation, including the acceptance of
ground warfare with Red China — although they believe it likely that we can
achieve the desired objective without such a war. This view is shared with Max-
well Taylor.

Ball-Thompson Position

Ball and I hompson believe that — short of a crushing military defeat — Hanoi
would never abandon the aggressive course it has pursued at great cost for ten
years and give up all the progress it has made in the Communization of South
Vietnam. For North Vietnam to call off the insurgency in South Vietnam, close
the border, and withdraw the elements it has infiltrated into that country would
mean that it had accepted unconditional surrender . 8

I had hoped that by associating McNamara, Bundy, and Llewellyn
I hompson in a joint effort to point out the dangers of escalation, I could
shake up the President and smoke out my colleagues. But my memoran-
dum accomplished nothing. The President met with Thompson, Bundy,
and me, read the memorandum quickly, then asked me to go through it
point-by-point. He thanked me and handed the memorandum back

59 2 The Vietnam Aberration

without f urther comment. Why he followed that uncharacteristic course
I do not know.

Pressure in the Administration’s boilers was rapidly building up for
an intensive bombing campaign. Insistence on the precondition of a sta-
ble government in Saigon was last month’s doctrine; now its most vocal
proponent, Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, was recommending escalation
of our air offensive as essential “to give Pulmotor treatment to a govern-
ment in extremis. ”

On Christmas Eve, the Viet Cong provided us a tailor-made excuse
for such an air offensive by planting a bomb in the Brink’s Hotel, a
bachelor officers quarters, that killed two Americans and wounded fifty-
eight. But the President was reluctant to initiate violence during the
Christmas season — a sensitivity Nixon later contemptuously disdained
when he launched his infamous Christmas bombing in 1972. Waiting
instead until February 13, 1965, two days after the Viet Cong attacked
the United States barracks at Qui Nhon, he ordered a sustained bomb-
ing campaign under the code name of “Rolling Thunder.’’

Discussion of October 1964 Memorandum

Since I had thoroughly conditioned the President to my opposition
to the war, I thought it time for him to read the critical analysis I had
prepared in October 1964. On February 24, 1965, I gave the document
to Bill Moyers at lunch and he gave it to the President that afternoon.
The following morning he called to say that the President had read and
re-read my memorandum, had “found it fascinating and wanted to know
why he had not read it before.”

The following Friday, February 26, the President called a meeting to
discuss my memorandum. That he had studied it was clear; he chal-
lenged specific points I had made and even remembered the page num-
bers where those arguments occurred. I outlined my position, and
Secretary McNamara responded with a pyrotechnic display of facts and
statistics to prove that I had overstated the difficulties we were now
encountering, suggesting at least by nuance, that I was not only preju-
diced but ill-informed. Secretary Rusk made a passionate argument about
the dangers of not going forward. The meeting, though lasting a long
while, ended on an inconclusive note. I had made no converts. My hope
to force a systematic reexamination of our total situation had manifestly
failed.

On March 8, 1965, two marine battalions were landed at Danang,
and, by the end of March — after Rolling Thunder had been rolling and
thundering for six weeks without perceptible results — General West-
moreland clamored for additional troop deployments. By now, even the
air power zealots realized that bombing alone would not critically reduce

The Balloon Rises Quickly 393

the enemy’s fighting capacity. Pressure for substantial further troop
commitments mounted all through March and became irresistible when,
on March 29, Viet Cong guerrillas blew up the American embassy in
Saigon. At that moment I was flying to Europe to meet with the NATO
Council in Paris and did not return until Sunday, April 4. I missed the
key meetings on April 1 and 2 at which the President decided to increase
support forces in South Vietnam by an additional eighteen to twenty
thousand men.

Secretary Rusk and I saw President Johnson on the morning of April
20. Secretary McNamara, Ambassador Taylor, and the military com-
manders then meeting in Honolulu had, so the President told us, agreed
that the enemy was spreading its control ineluctably; they now recom-
mended that we increase the authorized ground force deployment to
eighty-two thousand men, with the possibility of further increases later.
I responded with an emotional plea that the President not take such a
hazardous leap into space without further exploring the possibilities of
settlement; I went farther than I had intended, suggesting that a settle-
ment might then be possible. President Johnson replied, “All right,
George, I’ll give you until tomorrow morning to get me a settlement
plan. If you can pull a rabbit out of the hat, I’m all for it!”

I drafted a long memorandum which I sent to the President later
that night, suggesting moves to take advantage of what, I implied, could
be a diplomatic opening. It was a deliberate stalling tactic, yet I could
not let us take this tragically definitive step without employing all avail-
able tactics to slow the process.

Operation Rolling Thunder, I pointed out, had not achieved its
declared purposes, and we dared no longer postpone a settlement.

1. We cannot continue to bomb the North and use napalm against the South
Vietnamese villages without a progressive erosion of our world position. . . .

2. I doubt that the American people will be willing to accept substantially
increased casualties if the war continues over a substantial period of time and
there are no signs of active diplomacy. Distasteful as it is, we must face the hard
fact that large and articulate elements in the intellectual community and other
segments of United States opinion do not believe in our South Vietnamese pol-
icy. In fact, to many Americans our position appears far more ambiguous — and
hence far more dubious — than in the Korean War.

Until now, the American people have gone along out of their great confi-
dence in you and because the United States casualties have been less than a
weekend’s traffic accidents.

But even a doubling of the casualties would begin to make a dif ference.

My proposal called for the creation of a coalition government. The
Saigon regime would declare a general amnesty permitting “all Viet Cong
wishing to return to the North” to do so. An International Control Com-

394

The Vietnam Aberration

mission would undertake to police the cease-fire. “Once the new govern-
ment was installed, the United States would withdraw.”

The President read the memorandum overnight, and we met with
him again at eleven o’clock the following morning. I had not, I soon
realized, “pulled a rabbit out of the hat” — at least not a rabbit strong
enough to fight off the hounds of war baying at its heels. Yet the next
day, Bill Moyers called to say that the President had asked him to obtain
a copy of my memorandum for himself. “The President,” he said, “is
very interested in your idea.” The following day, Moyers called me again
to say that, in the light of my memorandum, the President had talked
with him about the need to get some people together to do nothing for
three or four days but ponder the political and peaceful alternatives in
Southeast Asia.

I desperately needed at least one high-level confrere on my side; how
could the President be expected to adopt the heresies of an Under Sec-
retary against the contrary views of his whole top command? But since
no top-level official shared my view, I decided to seek help outside. I
drafted the outline of a plan to substitute “political activity ... for a
shooting war in one after another of the provinces of South Vietnam
and enlisted the help of Dean Acheson and another old friend, Lloyd
Cutler, to expand my memorandum into a detailed program for “the
social and political reconstruction of South Vietnam.” The program
included an offer of amnesty to all Viet Cong adherents who ceased
fighting, a phased schedule for establishing a constitutional government
based on elections in which all peaceful citizens, including Viet Cong,
could take part, the adoption of social and economic programs outlined
in detail, and an announcement by the Prime Minister that foreign troops
would begin withdrawing as soon as the insurgency stopped and the
government had effectively extended its authority throughout the coun-
try.

My plan was so drafted as to avoid requiring the government of South
Vietnam to appear to be negotiating. The government would offer the
program as its own political act. As finally evolved, the proposal was set
forth in some thirty-five pages covering not merely its substantive but
also its procedural aspects as well as the mechanics for its execution.

1 knew I would first have to sell my plan to Ambassador Taylor and
Deputy Ambassador Alexis Johnson in Saigon, since only they could
persuade the South Vietnamese government to adopt it. I, therefore,
sent one of my personal assistants, Thomas Ehrlich, to Saigon to present
the plan directly. Taylor and Johnson replied with a long list of ques-
tions. Though Johnson seemed to have some qualified interest in the
proposal, Taylor was resolutely against it. I did my best to answer their
detailed questions in a long telegram, dated May 25, but Ambassador
Taylor was returning to Washington shortly and further discussions by
telegram would obviously be futile.

The Balloon Rises Quickly 395

The episode confirmed an opinion I had not wanted to accept.
America had become a prisoner of whatever Saigon military clique was
momentarily in power. Like a heroine in an eighteenth-century novel
who got her way by fainting if anyone spoke crossly, each clique under-
stood how to exploit its own weakness. If we demanded anything signif-
icant of it, it would collapse; so we never made any serious demands.

A Massive Escalation

Throughout the spring of 1965, the North Vietnamese responded
to our bombing program (Operation Rolling Thunder) precisely as pre-
dicted in my original October 5 memorandum; they infiltrated regular
North Vietnamese army units into the South. The Viet Cong began their
summer offensive with a strong assault inflicting on the South Vietnam-
ese Army (the ARVN) what the CIA described as a “total defeat.” By the
middle of June, with our military no longer believing that a gradual
buildup would achieve the required results, Secretary McNamara pro-
posed a total deployment of 395,000 personnel in South Vietnam by the
end of the year. In the fall of 1961, I had predicted to President Ken-
nedy that if he followed the recommendations of the Taylor-Rostow
report, we would have 300,000 men in South Vietnam within five years.
Now, within four years, we were about to exceed that figure by almost
100,000.

I sought vainly to forestall this escalation. Sensitive to President
Johnson’s almost obsessive determination never to lose command, I
headed my memorandum of June 18, 1965, “Keeping the Power of
Decision in the South Vietnam Crisis” and began it with the famous words
of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.”

“Your most difficult continuing problem in South Vietnam,” I wrote
the President, “is to prevent ‘things’ from getting into the saddle or, in
other words, finding a way to keep control of policy and prevent the
momentum of events from taking over.”

The best formula for maintaining freedom of decision is (a) to limit our com-
mitments in time and magnitude and (b) to establish specific time schedules for
the selection of optional courses of action on the basis of pre-established criteria.

Before we commit an endless flow of forces to South Vietnam we must have
more evidence than we now have that our troops will not bog down in the jungles
and rice paddies — while we slowly blow the country to pieces.

The French fought a war in Viet-Nam, and were finally defeated — after seven
years of bloody struggle and when they still had 250,000 combat-hardened vet-
erans in the field, supported by an army of 205,000 Vietnamese.

To be sure, the French were fighting a colonial war while we are fighting to
stop aggression. But when we have put enough Americans on the ground in
South Viet-Nam to give the appearance of a white man’s war, the distinction as
to our ultimate purpose will have less and less practical effect.

396 The Vietnam Aberration

Ever since 1961 — the beginning of our deep involvement in South Viet-Nam —
we have met successive disappointments. We have tended to overestimate the
effectiveness of our sophisticated weapons under jungle conditions. We have
watched the progressive loss of territory to Viet Cong control. We have been
unable to bring about the creation of a stable political base in Saigon.

The French, I pointed out, had much the same experience.

They quoted the same kind of statistics that guide our opinions — statistics as
to the number of enemy defectors, the rate of enemy desertions, etc. They fully
believed that the Vietnamese people were on their side, and their hopes received
intermittent shots of adrenalin from a succession of projects for winning the
war — the de Lattre de Tassigny Plan, the Salan Plan, the Navarre Plan, etc.

... we have not so far seen enough evidence to be sure that the South Viet-
namese forces will stand up under the heightening pressure — or, in fact, that
the Vietnamese people really have a strong will to fight after twenty years of
struggle. We cannot be sure how far the cancer has infected the whole body
politic of South Viet-Nam and whether we can do more than administer a cobalt
treatment to a terminal case.

Yet the more forces we deploy in South Viet-Nam — particularly in combat
roles — the harder we shall find it to extricate ourselves without unacceptable
costs if the war goes badly.

I sent the memorandum through Bill Moyers to the President on
Friday, June 18, and on Monday Moyers called to tell me that the Presi-
dent had read it over the weekend at Camp David and had discussed it
with him at lunch. The President agreed in substance, Moyers said, “with
most of the memorandum — one or two slight changes possibly.” Moyers
said that his notes reflected the following Presidential comments: “I don’t
think I should go over one hundred thousand but I think I should go to
that number and explain it. I want George to work for the next ninety
days — to work up what is going to happen after the monsoon season. I
am not worried about riding off in the wrong direction. I agreed that it
might build up bit by bit. I told McNamara that I would not make a
decision on this and not to assume that I am willing to go overboard on
this. I ain’t. If there is no alternative, the fellow who has the best pro-
gram is the way it will probably go.”

My advocacy had by now been reduced to a Chinese water torture;
all I could do was to keep on an incessant dripping of the by now familiar
arguments, increasingly documented by the disappointing events of a
futile war, in the hope that I might gradually wear away the resistance
of my colleagues and, most of all, the President. Cato, after all, had shown
the efficacy of repetition in his repeated denunciations of Carthage; if
he could use that technique to start a war, I might use the same tech-
nique to stop one. So I prepared a paper, dated June 28, 1965, entitled
“Cutting Our Losses in South Vietnam,” which announced at the outset
that it was “written on the premise that we are losing the war.” We must,

The Balloon Rises Quickly 397

I argued, “balance the risks and costs of a war fought by United States
forces against the risks and costs of a carefully organized tactical with-
drawal of the United States from South Vietnam or a systematic reduc-
tion of our territorial commitment to accord with the capabilities of a
limited US deployment.”

I then repeated my well-worn arguments for disengaging our inter-
ests from Saigon’s, once more stressing President Eisenhower’s prudent
conditions for American aid. “Since Americans are dying in South Viet-
nam,” my memorandum argued, “the United States has both the right
and duty to demand of Saigon that it fulfill these conditions or expect
our withdrawal.” We should promptly make a demarche on General Ky
and the leaders of all principal groups in Saigon that, unless within a
month’s time “those leaders put together a government of national union
under civilian leadership,” we would reconsider the extent of our com-
mitment. “What,” I continued, “would be the effect of such a notice?
Either it could induce the Ky Government to adopt an extreme nation-
alist position and announce that it would go it alone without United States
help or the Ky Government would fall in favor of a government pre-
pared to try to find a political solution with the Viet Cong. In either
event, we would expect a protracted discussion between US representa-
tives and representatives of the various Vietnamese factions. If Ky or his
successor demanded the removal of United States forces, he would be
almost certainly replaced by more moderate elements, since even neu-
tralist elements would still tend to regard our presence for a period of
time as essential to prolonged bargaining with the Viet Cong and Hanoi.”

If we withdrew after having demonstrated that Saigon was unpre-
pared to perform its part of the bargain, most friendly nations would
recognize that we had kept our commitments and that “our decision to
force the issue of stability and responsibility was a mark of prudence and
maturity.” Then, under the heading Renvoi , I set forth my own grim
assessment of the situation: “The position taken in this memorandum
does not suggest that the United States should abdicate leadership in the
cold war. But any prudent military commander carefully selects the ter-
rain on which to stand and fight, and no great captain has ever been
blamed for a successful tactical withdrawal. . . . [Vietnam] is clearly what
General de Gaulle described to me as ‘rotten country.’ South Viet-Nam
is . . . bled white from twenty years of war and the people are sick of it.

. . . South Vietnam is a country with an army and no government. Even
if we were to commit five hundred thousand men to South Vietnam we
would still lose.”

Appended to the memorandum was a section presenting, on a nation-
by-nation basis, the effect of an American withdrawal; the presentation
established, at least to my satisfaction, that those consequences would be
far less harmful than had often been asserted.

yg8 The Vietnam Aberration

The Approaching Day of Decision

The critical day of truth approached. Secretary McNamara was
pressing for increasing our ground deployments to whatever force levels
were needed to prove to the North Vietnamese that they “cannot win.”
Our forces, he recommended, should be brought within a few months to
the level of forty-four battalions, on the ground that, with a greatly
increased infiltration of North Vietnamese forces, the war would rapidly
become a conventional type of “main force” combat, which Americans
were equipped and trained to fight. I thought his “main force” predic-
tion misconceived — the North Vietnamese were not about to accommo-
date us by fighting the kind of war in which we had an advantage — but
I agreed with his appraisal that, if we followed his advice, “The war . . .
[would] be a long one.”

The war was rapidly careening out of control, and I was less and less
optimistic that I could deflect the strong forces steadily gaining momen-
tum. Nevertheless, on July 1, I sent the President a memorandum enti-
tled “A Compromise Solution for South Vietnam.” As the following
excerpts make clear, it once again expressed my pessimism:

A Losing War: The South Vietnamese are losing the war to the Viet Cong. No
one can assure you that we can beat the Viet Cong or even force them to the
conference table on our terms no matter how many hundred thousand white
foreign (US) troops we deploy.

No one has demonstrated that a white ground force of whatever size can win
a guerrilla war — which is at the same time a civil war between Asians — in jungle
terrain in the midst of a population that refuses cooperation to the white forces
(and the SVN) and thus provides a great intelligence advantage to the other side.

The decision you face now, therefore, is crucial. Once large numbers of US
troops are committed to direct combat they will begin to take heavy casualties in
a war they are ill-equipped to fight in a non-cooperative if not downright hostile
countryside.

Once we suffer large casualties we will have started a well-nigh irreversible
process. Our involvement will be so great that we cannot — without national
humiliation — stop short of achieving our complete objectives. Of the two possibili-
ties I think humiliation would be more likely than the achievement of our objectives — even
after we had paid terrible costs.

To show that the costs of a compromise solution were greatly exag-
gerated, I again reviewed the possible impact of a compromise settle-
ment on each country of importance to us. I also frontally challenged
McNamara’s contention that we were about to enter “third phase” war-
fare. “Implicit in arguments for greatly augmented United States com-
bat forces in South Vietnam is the assumption that the Viet Cong have
entered — or are about to enter — their so-called “third phase” of warf are,
having progressed from relatively small-scale hit-and-run operations to

The Balloon Rises Quickly 599

large unit, fixed position conventional warfare. Yet we have no basis for
assuming that the Viet Cong will fight a war on our terms when they can
continue to fight the kind of war they fought so well against both the
French and the GVN.”

Mac Bundy gave the President my memorandum, along with mem-
oranda by his brother William Bundy and McNamara. In his transmittal
note, he advised, “My hunch is you will want to listen hard to George
Ball and then reject his proposal. Discussion could then move on to the
narrower choice between my brother’s course and McNamara’s.”

The Critical Decision

I hereafter, the war continued to go badly. When my colleagues and
I assembled at the White House on the morning of July 21, 1965, we
were given a memorandum from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Only the
prompt deployment of large bodies of American troops could, it argued,
save the situation. I hat meant committing thousands of our young men
not merely to passive defense missions but to aggressive combat roles.
The war would then become unequivocally our own. There would be no
turning back for months, perhaps years — not until we had suffered hor-
rible casualties, killed thousands of Vietnamese, and raised the level of
national anxiety and f rustration above the threshold of hysteria.

Because of the importance of the July 21 meeting it may be useful to
outline the colloquy which suggests the substance and flavor of our many
long discussions. 9 It also provides some sense of the President’s agoniz-
ing reluctance to go forward, his desire to explore every possible alter-
native, and, finally, his inability to reconcile his vaunted Texas “can-do”
spirit with the shocking reality that America had painted itself into a
corner with no way out except at substantial costs in terms of pride and
prestige.

I he President began with searching questions. Could we get more
soldiers from our allies.'" What had altered the situation to the present
point of urgency? McNamara produced a map. The Viet Cong, it showed,
controlled about 25 percent of the South. United States forces would not
be committed in those areas; they would be deployed “with their backs
to the sea, for protection. They would conduct search and destroy
operations against large-scale units.

“Why,” I asked, “does anyone think that the Viet Cong will be so
considerate as to confront us directly? They certainly didn’t do that for
the French.” General Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
replied, “We can force them to fight by harassment.”

After the others had expressed support for the proposed new esca-
lation, the President asked whether any of us opposed it, looking directly
at me. I made my usual speech, pointing out that we would be embark-

400 The Vietnam Aberration

ing on “a perilous voyage” and could not win. But, he asked, what other
courses were available? We must, I replied, stop deceiving ourselves, face
reality, and cut our losses. “If we get bogged down, the costs will be far
greater than a planned withdrawal, while the pressures to create a larger
war could become irresistible. We must stop propping up that absurd
travesty of a government in Saigon. Let’s let it fall apart and negotiate a
withdrawal, recognizing that the country will face a probable take-over
by the Communists.”

The President replied, “You’ve pointed out the dangers but you’ve
not really proposed an alternative.”

After others had expressed similar sentiments, the President once
more turned to me. “George,” he asked, “do you think we have another
course?” I answered, “I certainly don’t agree with the course Bob McNa-
mara’s recommending.” “All right,” said the President, “we’ll hear you
out; then I can determine if any of your suggestions are sound and can
be followed. I’m prepared to do that if convinced.”

I could, I said, present to him only “the least bad of two courses.”
The course I could recommend was costly, but we could at least limit the
cost to the short-term. At that point — -just as I was beginning to speak —
the President interrupted. “We’ll have another meeting this afternoon
where you can express your views in detail.” Meanwhile, he wanted a
further justification for the introduction of one-hundred-thousand more
troops. In response to the President’s concern about increased losses,
General Taylor directly contradicted a view expressed earlier by Secre-
tary McNamara that our losses in Vietnam would be proportional to the
number of our men in that country. “The more men we have,” the Gen-
eral now declared, “the greater the likelihood of smaller losses.”

When we reconvened at 2:30 that afternoon, the President asked me
to explain my position. I outlined why, in my view, we could not win.
Even after a protracted conflict the most we could hope to achieve was
“a messy conclusion” with a serious danger of intervention by the
Chinese. 10 In a long war, I said, the President would lose the support of
the country. I showed him a chart I had prepared showing the correla-
tion between Korean casualties and public opinion. As our casualties
during the Korean War had increased from 1 1,000 to 40,000, the per-
centage of those Americans who thought that we had been right to
intervene had diminished from 56 percent in 1950 to a little more than
30 percent in 1952. Moreover, as our losses mounted, many frustrated
Americans would demand that we strike at the “very jugular of North
Vietnam” with all the dangers that entailed. Were it possible for us to
win decisively in a year’s time, friendly nations might continue to sup-
port us. But that was not in the cards.

“No great captain in history ever hesitated to make a tactical with-
drawal if conditions were unfavorable to him,” I argued. “We can’t even

The Balloon Rises Quickly 401

find the enemy in Vietnam. We can’t see him and we can’t find him. He’s
indigenous to the country, and he always has access to much better
intelligence. He knows what we’re going to do but we haven’t the vaguest
clue as to his intentions. I have grave doubts that any Western army can
successfully fight Orientals in an Asian jungle.”

"That’s the key question,” the President remarked. “Can Westerners,
deprived of accurate intelligence, successfully fight Asians in the jungles
and rice paddies?”

We had, I continued, underestimated the critical conditions in South
Vietnam. “What we are doing is giving cobalt treatment to a terminal
cancer case. A long, protracted war will disclose our weakness, not our
strength.”

Since our main concern was to avoid undermining our credibility, we
should shift the burden to the South Vietnamese government. We should
insist on reforms that it would never undertake, which would impel it to
move toward a neutralist position and ask us to leave. “I have no illu-
sions, I said, “that after we were asked to leave South Vietnam, that
country would soon come under Hanoi’s control. That’s implicit in our
predicament.” I then discussed the effect on other nations in the area.

The President then asked the question most troubling him. “Wouldn’t
we lose all credibility by breaking the word of three Presidents?” I replied,
“We’ll suffer the worst blow to our credibility when it is shown that the
mightiest power on earth can’t defeat a handful of miserable guerrillas.”

Then, asked the President, “aren’t you basically troubled by what the
world would say about our pulling out?”

If we were helping a country with a stable, viable government, it
would be a vastly different story. But we’re dealing with a revolvingjunta.
How much support,” I asked rhetorically, “do we really have in South
Vietnam?”

The President then mentioned two of my points that particularly
troubled him. One was that Westerners could never win a war in Asia;
the other was that we could not successfully support a people whose
government changed every month. He then asked, “What about the
reaction of the Europeans? Wouldn’t they be shaken in their reliance on
us if we pulled out of Vietnam?”

“1 hat idea’s based on a complete misunderstanding of the way the
Europeans are thinking,” I said. “They don’t regard what we are doing
in Vietnam as in any way comparable to our involvement in Europe.
Since the french pulled out of Vietnam, they can hardly blame us for
doing the same thing; they cut their losses, and de Gaulle is urging us to
follow suit. Having retired from their empire, the British recognize an
established fact when they see one. They’re not going to blame us for
doing the same thing, although they might get a little mischievous plea-
sure from it — what the Germans call schadenfreude. But basically they only

402 The Vietnam Aberration

care about one thing. They’re concerned about their own security. Troops
in Berlin have real meaning; troops in Vietnam have none.”

I then summarized the alternatives. “We can continue a dragged out,
bitterly costly, and increasingly dangerous war, with the North Vietnam-
ese digging in for a long term since that’s their life and driving force.”
Or “we can face the short-term losses of pulling out. It’s distasteful
either way; but life’s full of hard choices.”

McGeorge Bundy then intervened to suggest that, while I had raised
truly important questions, the course I recommended would be a “radi-
cal switch in policy without visible evidence that it should be done.
“George’s analysis,” he said, “gives no weight to losses suffered by the
other side. The world, the country, and the Vietnamese people would
have alarming reactions if we got out.” Dean Rusk then stated that, if
the Communist world found out that we would not pursue our commit-
ment to the end, there was no telling where they would stop their expan-
sionism. He rejected my assessment of the situation. The Viet Cong had
not established much of a position among the Vietnamese people, and
he did not foresee large casualties unless the Chinese should come in.
Ambassador Lodge agreed. There would, he said, be a greater threat of
starting World War III if we did not go in with our forces. I here were
great seaports in Vietnam, and we did not have to fight on the roads.
After more talk along the same lines the meeting was adjourned.

Support from an Unexpected Quarter

The next day we met once more to hear the President’s report of
what the generals had told him. That meeting stands out in my memory
not for anything I said — I had, after all, exhausted my persuasive arse-
nal — but rather because, for the first time, I found support from an
unexpected quarter.

The President had asked his old friend Clark Clifford to attend and
called on him to express his views. Presenting his argument with elegant
precision and structure as though arguing a case before the Supreme
Court, Clifford voiced strong opposition to the commitment of combat
forces. He put forward the same arguments I had made the day before;
in addition, he gave the President a more authoritative assessment of the
probable domestic consequences Whether or not President Johnson knew
in advance of the position Clifford would take I cannot say; sometimes
I suspected that he staged meetings for the benefit of the rest of us. But,
whatever the answer to that question, Clifford emerged as a formidable
comrade on my side of the barricades.

When the meeting was over, I asked Clifford to join me in the fish
Room. I told him that ever since the fall of 1961 I had been making the
same arguments he now made so eloquently, and I gave him copies of

The Dusty End of a Reign of Error 403

the memoranda I had submitted to the President. The next day Clifford
told me that he had spent the previous evening until two in the morning
carefully studying my memoranda. They were, he said, “impressive and
persuasive.” Throughout the last year he had come more and more to
my opinion as he continued to receive reports of our deteriorating situ-
ation.

I told Clark that judging from the meeting we had just had that day
with the President, his intervention had had a salutary effect. Clifford
replied that he had been told through “another source” that there would
have to be a great effort made if we were to block this critical escalatory
step that would change the character of the war. Though he hoped that
through our combined exertions we could make progress, he was not
optimistic. Unfortunately, “individuals sometimes become so bound up
in a certain course it is difficult to know where objectivity stops and per-
sonal involvement begins.” In any event, he had tried to impress on the
President that we should down-play the talk that “this was the Armaged-
don between Communism and the Free World.”

Clark Clifford had been close to the President for many years. Per-
haps his opposition might turn the balance. We had one other powerful
supporter, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who, at the Presi-
dent’s meeting with the Congressional leadership, had weighed in along
the same line we were taking. There was, he had argued, no legitimate
government in South Vietnam and we owed nothing to the current cabal.
We were being pushed progressively deeper into the war, and even total
victory would be enormously costly. Our best hope was for a quick stale-
mate and negotiation; the American people would never support a war
that might last three to five years. We were about to get into an anti-
Communist crusade. “Remember,” he had concluded prophetically,
“escalation begets escalation.” Finally, there was my friend Senator J.
William Fulbright, who had arrived at a position similar to mine, but the
President had already written him off and rejected his view of the war.

As the whole world now knows, we did not carry the day — neither
Mansfield, Clifford, Fulbright, nor I — and the balloon went up farther
and farther.

26. The Dusty End of a Reign of Error

As the war became progressively larger and bloodier, some of
my colleagues talked with increasing wistfulness of a negotiated solution,
which, in their vocabulary, meant Hanoi’s capitulation. That was, I
thought, quite unrealistic; the North Vietnamese would never stop fight-

404 The Vietnam Aberration

ing until they had obtained terms that would assure their takeover of the
entire country. I had, therefore, only a marginal interest in efforts to
open channels; they were not the answer. I did not see us achieving
peace by the two techniques then being strongly urged: bombing pauses
and the establishment of a multiplicity of diplomatic contacts. The bat-
tle-hardened leaders in Hanoi had no interest in mechanisms that would
facilitate their crying “Uncle” in a low voice and with minimal loss of
face; their interest was in forcing us to go home.

Bombing Pauses

A bombing pause, unaccompanied by significant concessions was
merely pulling up a plant to see how well its roots were growing. From
the middle of 1964 until the end of September 1966, when I left the
State Department, there were two pauses. I supported both, not because
I expected anything to come of them, but because I hoped they would
break the rhythm of escalation. The first pause, which began on May 13,
1965, and lasted only until May 18, was, as I pointed out to my staff, not
so much a pause as a hiccup. We told the Soviets in advance and tried to
pass word to Hanoi (which rejected the receipt of our message) but we
neglected to tell the American people or even the American military.
The foreign minister of Hanoi denounced the pause as a “deceitful
maneuver to pave the way for American escalation” — which I thought a
perceptive appraisal. Peking called it a “fraud.”

In spite of the f ailure of the first pause, Secretary McNamara contin-
ued to advocate “low-key diplomacy” to lay the groundwork for a settle-
ment, stating that “We could, as part of a diplomatic initiative, consider
introducing a 6-8 week pause in the program of bombing the North.” 1
He repeated that recommendation in a memorandum to the President
on November 3. On November 30, 1965, he sought to justify it as pri-
marily a ritual gesture “before we either greatly increase our troop
deployments to Vietnam or intensify our strikes against the North.” It
would, he argued, “lay a foundation in the mind of the American public
and in world opinion for such an enlarged phase of the war, and” — he
added, I thought, with no conviction — “it should give North Vietnam a
face-saving chance to stop the aggression.” 2 Secretary Rusk was not con-
vinced; a pause was a serious diplomatic instrument; it could be used
only once, and this was not the time to use it. President Johnson had a
different concern; a pause that evoked no response would, he feared,
provoke a demand for much stronger action from the American right
wing — and they, he warned me, were “the Great Beast to be feared.”

For several weeks the debate continued. On December 23, I left to
spend Christmas at our family house in Florida. On the evening of Mon-
day, December 28, the President telephoned me to say, “George, you

The Dusty End of a Reign of Error 405

wanted a pause and I’m giving you one. Now I need you to get it going.
I’m sending a plane for you in the morning.”

I he President called me home to help plan a diplomatic extrava-
ganza. He would send Administration personalities flying all over the
world; they would tell heads of state and chiefs of government about the
pause and enlist their help to bring Hanoi to the negotiating table. Averell
Harriman would visit Poland and Yugoslavia, McGeorge Bundy Can-
ada, Ambassador Foy Kohler would speak with Soviet officials, while
Arthur Goldberg would call on General de Gaulle, Prime Minister Wil-
son, the Pope, and the Italian government. 3 My own travel assignments
were modest. I was to fly to Puerto Rico to meet Senator Fulbright fresh
off the eighteenth green and then to Florida to see Senators Dirksen
and Mansfield.

Although President Johnson obviously enjoyed this frenetic to-ing
and fro-ing (he delighted in his ability to send well-known people flying
all over the world), I thought the spectacle futile and unbecoming. Still,
as I was to reflect later, better a Christmas peace extravaganza than the
Christmas bombing Nixon ordered in 1974. If that was part of the price
we paid for a bombing pause, so be it; we at least broke the momentum
of escalation, even though we would be under grave pressure to increase
the pace of the war once the pause was completed.

Negotiating Gestures

I he Administration constantly scanned the sky for smoke signals from
Hanoi. It used disavowable envoys to try to provoke indications of will-
ingness to talk and carried on probing operations with Iron Curtain dip-
lomats. 4 Meanwhile, more and more of our young men were being sent
to South Vietnam and casualties were rising. To borrow a phrase I had
once heard Walter Lippmann use to describe his own frustrations, I felt
I was “trying to swim up Niagara Falls.” Not that I was idle; the President
constantly pressed me for new negotiating ideas — though he really meant
merely new channels and procedures. We were, as I told my colleagues,
“following the traditional pattern for negotiating with a mule: just keep
hitting him on the head with a two-by-four until he does what you want
him to do. But that was useless with Hanoi; the mule’s head was harder
than the two-by-four.

On January 5, 1966, I sent the President two memoranda. One called
for him to approach the heads of governments of the United Kingdom,
Soviet Union, China, North Vietnam, and South Vietnam to request a
secret meeting of the foreign ministers of those five countries with the
United States to be held in Vienna beginning January 17, for prelimi-
nary discussions of the problem of Vietnam. The timing seemed propiti-
ous since a key member of the Soviet politburo, Alexander Shelepin,

406 The Vietnam Aberration

would shortly be visiting Hanoi, and we might thus arm him with specific
proposals to press on the North Vietnamese. The second memorandum
discussed possible ways and means of involving the United Nations in a
peace ef fort, using either the Security Council or a special session of the
General Assembly. Though I had little faith the United Nations could be
useful, I still included a draft Security Council resolution.

As expected, the bombing pause evoked no response; by January,
pressures were mounting to resume bombing and escalate the war. On
January 20, I sent a memorandum to the President arguing that “the
resumption of bombing may well frustrate the very political objectives
we have in mind. There is no evidence that bombing has so far had any
appreciable effect in weakening the determination of Ho Chi Minh and
his colleagues. Whatever evidence there is points in the opposite direc-
tion.” I recalled my experience on the Strategic Bombing Survey, point-
ing out that in both Europe and Japan the Survey found that “one does
not break the will of the population of a police state by heavy bombing.”

I followed my memorandum against bombing with a long analytical
memorandum to the President. Prepared with the advice of recognized
China experts Professors Allen Whiting and Fred Green, it pointed out
why and how our bombing posed grave dangers of war with China.
Today — with the wisdom of hindsight — it is clear that I overestimated
the prospect of Chinese intervention. But President Johnson was deeply
preoccupied with the China menace and the more I emphasized it, the
stronger was my case for cutting our losses.

McNamara s Views

I had a distaste for ex parte Presidential approaches and whenever I
wrote a memorandum to the President calling for our extrication, I
showed it first to Rusk, McNamara, and Mac Bundy. Secretary McNa-
mara and John McNaughton almost always responded by a prompt and
courteous visit. Two or three times they showed me memoranda pre-
pared by McNaughton commenting on what I had written, sometimes
expressing views along the same general line while avoiding my hard
conclusions. Though momentarily exhilarated by this prospect of sup-
port, I found McNamara unwilling to express those same realistic, if
discouraging, views in meetings called by the President to discuss my
various memoranda. Whether he privately discussed them with the Pres-
ident I do not know.

By May 1967, seven months after I had left the government, a draft
memorandum by John McNaughton finally accepted the analysis I had
been urging for the three previous years: “it now appears that no com-
bination of actions against the North short of destruction of the regime
or occupation of North Vietnamese territory will physically reduce the

The Dusty End of a Reign of Error 40J

How of men and materiel below the relatively small amount needed by
enemy forces to continue the war in the South. . . .” 5

First Meeting of “the Usual Suspects'

Even after my resignation in September 1966, I could not free myself
from the oppressive burden of the war. It was a blight on all America —
the continued killing, the dark apprehensions as we ventured more and
more onto bottomless quicksand, and the hysteria in the universities that
was taking an increasingly nasty turn. On November 1, 1967, at Presi-
dent Johnson s request, I attended a meeting at the State Department as
a member of the so-called Senior Advisory Group — or, as the press called
us, “the wise old men,” the “elder statesmen” or, more derisively, “the
usual suspects.” We had dinner with Secretary Rusk and then met the
following morning with the President. I made my usual plea for extri-
cation to the usual deaf ears; the war, said the other members of the
group, must be vigorously pursued. The major problem, they superci-
liously asserted, was how to educate American opinion. As I came out of
the Cabinet Room, I said to Dean Acheson, John J. McCloy, and — if I
recall properly — John Cowles of Minneapolis, “I’ve been watching across
the table. You’re like a flock of old buzzards sitting on a fence, sending
the young men off to be killed. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”
I was as surprised as they— and a little embarrassed— by the intensity of
my outburst.

I he year 1968 caught Washington offguard with the shattering Tet
offensive, which lasted for twenty-five days, from dawn on January 31
until February 24. In February, the President commissioned Dean Ache-
son to make an independent study of the war. Much to the President’s
dismay, Acheson concluded that we could not win without an unlimited
commitment of forces — and that even then it might take five years. The
country, Acheson told Johnson, was no longer behind the Administra-
tion, nor did Americans any longer believe what the President was tell-
ing them. Then, during the next few months, Clark Clifford, the newly
appointed Secretary of Defense, accumulated mounting evidence that
the war could not be won. 6 Outnumbered eight to one within the circle
of advisers closest to the President, and now faced with a request from
General Westmoreland for the deployment of 206,000 additional men,
Clifford looked about, as I had done earlier, for outside help. The Pres-
ident should, he proposed, meet once again with members of the Senior
Advisory Group, who would be briefed on the war and asked to express
their views.

Second “Senior Advisory Group ” Meeting

At 7 : 3° p.m. on Monday, March 25, 1968, five months after our ear-
lier meeting, we met in the office of Secretary of State Dean Rusk: Dean

408 The Vietnam Aberration

Acheson, Omar Bradley, McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Dean, Douglas Dil-
lon, Abe Fortas, Robert Murphy, General Matthew Ridgway, Cyrus
Vance, and I. After dinner we heard briefings from three government
officials: Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Philip Habib, who reviewed
the political situation. Major General William DePuy, who spoke of our
military posture, and George Carver of the CIA, who talked about pac-
ification and the condition of the enemy. If the North Vietnamese were
to be expelled from the South and the country pacified, it would — so
our briefers estimated — take at least five to ten more years. The follow-
ing morning, we talked with the senior officials of the government: Dean
Rusk, Clark Clifford, and others. Secretary Clifford spoke bluntly about
the choices our country faced. We could either expand the war and
muddle along or pursue a “reduced strategy” — cutting back on the
bombing and using American troops only to defend certain populated
areas.

Dean Acheson was the first of our group to acknowledge that he had
changed his mind; we could not, he said, achieve our objective through
military means . 7 Views were expressed around the table, and I thought
to myself, “there’s been a mistake in the invitation list; these can’t be the
same men I saw here last November.” Toward noon, we went to the
White House to lunch with the President in the family dining room.
During lunch, General Creighton Abrams, just back from Vietnam, told
us how he was training the South Vietnamese army with the object of
“Vietnamizing” the war.

The President then dismissed all members of the government so as
to meet alone with our group of outsiders. When we had gathered in
the Cabinet Room, he asked McGeorge Bundy to summarize our collec-
tive views. Bundy mentioned particularly Dean Acheson’s current opin-
ion that we could not achieve our objectives within the limits of time and
resources available. We would therefore have to change our policy dras-
tically. Though that reflected the general view of the group he noted
that Abe Fortas and Bob Murphy had dissented. Bundy then made a
remark that deeply impressed me not merely for its import but its gen-
erosity: “I must tell you what I thought I would never say — that I now
agree with George Ball.” Bombing in the North, which Bundy had ear-
lier favored as the way of raising the price of insurgencies around the
world, staving off defeat in the South, and providing an ultimate bar-
gaining chip was, he had now decided, doing more to erode the support
of the war on the homefront than harming the North Vietnamese.

Dean Acheson announced his position in his clear, lawyerlike way.
We could not stop the “belligerency” in Vietnam by any acceptable means
within the time allowed to us. In view of our other problems and inter-
ests, including the dollar crisis, we should seek to disengage by midsum-
mer. There was little support for the war in South Vietnam or in the

The Dusty End of a Reign of Error 409

United States. Acheson did not think the American people would permit
the war to go on for more than another year. Douglas Dillon spoke against
sending additional troops and advocated stopping the bombing in an
effort to move toward a negotiated settlement. He had been deeply
impressed by the comments he had heard the night before that it would
take five to ten years to conclude the war. General Ridgway, who had,
from the first, opposed our intervention, also recommended the with-
drawal of American forces, while Cyrus Vance, who, when Deputy Sec-
retary of Defense, had always appeared to support our Vietnamese
efforts, now insisted that since the war was bitterly dividing the country,
it was time to seek a negotiated settlement.

I made my usual speech against the war. We could not hope to
negotiate a sensible withdrawal until we stopped bombing North Viet-
nam. I emphasized, as I had done many times before, that the war was
demoralizing our country and creating grave political divisions and that
we had to get out.

There is no doubt that the unexpected negative conclusions of the
“elder statesmen” profoundly shook the President. Later he grumbled
to me, “Your whole group must have been brainwashed and I’m going
to find out what Habib and the others told you.”

No one will ever know the extent to which our advice contributed to
President Johnson’s decision — announced to the American people in a
television speech six days after our meeting — that he would not run for
President in 1968. He had, he announced, “unilaterally” ordered a halt
to the air and naval bombardment of most of North Vietnam. Even that
“very limited bombing of the North could come to an early end if our
restraint is matched by restraint in Hanoi.” Only at the end of his address
did he announce his decision to withdraw from the Presidential race.

I hough I knew President Johnson desperately wanted to get us out
of Vietnam, he was incapable of it. His Administration had accumulated
too much baggage of past statements and actions, too many fixed ideas,
and too many positions it could not easily reverse. But by taking himself
out of the Presidential race, Lyndon Johnson had paved the way for
America’s extrication, and I hoped our Vietnamese nightmare might
soon be over. In spite of Hubert Humphrey’s loyal and excessively exu-
berant support for President Johnson, I knew that he was personally
revolted by the war. Once a Humphrey Administration were in place,
we might then move promptly toward extrication.

Richard Nixon was in an even better position to end the war and he
had everything to gain by a quick extrication. The twelve years since
John Foster Dulles had first involved us in Vietnam far exceeded the
short attention span of most Americans, and no one held the Republi-
cans responsible for the current ghastly mess. By promptly negotiating
an American withdrawal, Nixon could not only quiet the country but

410 The Vietnam Aberration

win almost universal approbation. Mendes-France had extricated France
from its “dirty” Indochinese War within a month after becoming Prime
Minister in 1954. That was a precedent to be pondered.

But Nixon was not, as popularly believed, a skillful politician. He was
introverted, full of complexes, preoccupied with self, and insensitive to
the national mood and the increasingly ominous seismic rumblings.
Lacking the humanity of Humphrey and the wisdom and courage of
Mendes-France, he had always been the archetypal hawk, ready at slight
provocation to dispatch Americans to kill and be killed. As Vice-Presi-
dent in 1954, he had supported the deployment of United States troops
to replace French losses and the following year had advocated that we
use atomic weapons to halt Chinese moves into Vietnam. Ten years later,
in 1964, he had urged retaliatory airstrikes against Laos and North Viet-
nam; the following year, he had opposed the Johnson Administration’s
efforts to start negotiations on the ground that the North Vietnamese
would regard it as evidence of weakness. He had dissented in 1966, when
Congressman Gerald Ford and Melvin Laird had criticized Johnson for
committing the United States so deeply in Vietnam. Nixon had opposed
constant calls for negotiation since those would only encourage Hanoi,
and he predicted that the war would go on at least through 1971. 8 Most
recently, during the Presidential campaign, he had attacked the Johnson
Administration for its policy of gradualism in the use of force.

Perpetuation of a Fallacy

Nixon’s central thesis was that we had failed in Vietnam because we
had not used the full force at our command. To him, bombing mythol-
ogy was divinely certified; like General Curtis LeMay, he seemed pre-
pared, if necessary, to “bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age.

My wistful hope that the new Administration would show more wis-
dom than its predecessor thus had little to support it. Nixon had, as
Talleyrand said of the Bourbons, “learned nothing and forgotten noth-
ing” from Lyndon Johnson’s experience and was thus doomed to repeat
and even expand Johnson’s mistakes. He reverted to the Johnson
Administration’s attitude toward the war that had prevailed in 1965 —
before most of my colleagues had conceded — at least to themselves —
that the war could not be won.

By protracting the war and using massive air power, Nixon believed
that we could wear down the enemy and ultimately achieve “peace with
honor.’’ That slogan was the tip-off; not only did the new President co-
opt the terminology of Lyndon Johnson, but he exaggerated and
improved on it. “For the United States, this first defeat in our nation s
history would result in a collapse of confidence in American leadership,
not only in Asia but throughout the world.” 9 And, in defending our
Cambodian invasion, he said, “If, when the chips are down, the world’s

The Dusty End of a Reign of Error 41 1

most powerful nation . . . acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of
totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institu-
tions throughout the world.” 10

For such an astute man, Henry Kissinger also seemed to have entered
the government with an unrealistic view of the war. Though his old
friend, Jean Sainteny, the French expert on Indochina, had told him
that America was engaged in a “hopeless enterprise” in Vietnam, he
rejected that advice as the product of pride and nationalism. Like my
colleagues in the Johnson Administration, he gave no weight to the les-
sons of the French experience and he also seems to have shared Nixon’s
view of air power. Neither understood the limited effect of bombing
against a fanatical enemy any more than had Walt Rostow or Maxwell
Taylor before them.

Kissinger’s initial assessment of our Vietnam prospects sounded as
though he had been absent in Mars during the preceding three years.
Soon after arriving in the White House in 1969, he is reported to have
told a visiting group of Quaker antiwar activists that he was “quite opti-
mistic’’ about the prospects of a rapid settlement. “Give us six months,”
he told them, “and if we haven’t ended the war by then, you can come
back and tear down the White House fence.” 11 By dealing North Viet-
nam some “brutal blows” we could, he was confident, force it to make
the kinds of concessions that would secure peace; he ref used “to believe
that a little fourth-rate power like Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking
point.” 12 It was the McNamara quantitative approach all over again.

When he first met with a North Vietnamese representative, he “half
believed,” he now confesses, “that rapid progress could be made if we
could convince them of our sincerity.” 13 Even after he had been negoti-
ating for some months, he showed little more sense of reality. “I had
great hope for negotiations — perhaps, as events turned out, more than
was warranted : a qualification that was, by any standard, astonishing
understatement. “I even thought,” he admits, that “a tolerable outcome
could be achieved within a year.” 14

In failing to recognize that North Vietnamese obduracy far tran-
scended the constraints of Western logic, the Nixon Administration
spurned the grim lessons Americans should by then have learned. Under
Nixon’s guidance, America dropped twice the weight of bombs in
Indochina as had been dropped during the whole of the Johnson Ad-
ministration. But in the end, Hanoi conceded nothing substantial, over-
ran South Vietnam, and emerged with everything it wanted.

The Same Old Rationale

Every new Administration feels it can improve on the performance
of the past. The Nixon Administration’s initial error was to accept
uncritically its predecessor’s rationale for staying in the war. America, it

412

The Vietnam Aberration

averred, had to win to preserve confidence in its promises, or, as John
McNaughton had put it, to save its “reputation as a guarantor” (which
was by then the trendy catchphrase). Even more important, Nixon per-
petuated the Johnson Administration’s fallacy of defining reputation in
narrow and mechanistic terms.

On what components of reputation did America’s leadership most
heavily depend? Unlike the totalitarian nations, America was — at least in
comparative terms — regarded as humane, fair, generous, and dedicated
to showing “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” We were not
ideologically driven; we were thought not to indulge in the brutal prac-
tices of either the Soviet Union or China. All this we were putting at risk
in Vietnam. Our use of napalm, flame throwers, defoliating chemicals,
and heavy bombers was sending a shudder through the civilized world.
Not only did we appear a great bully, there were also racial implications:
would we treat a white population with the same brutality to achieve the
same exiguous objective?

To preserve the respect on which our leadership depended, we
needed to look at our reputation as a whole, not measure it solely by the
degree of our obsessive support for an involvement most Americans —
and indeed most of our allies — thought imprudent and unrelated to our
strategic interests. When we engaged in increasingly indiscriminate kill-
ings in a futile attempt to achieve a marginal objective, our friends shook
their heads with wonder and worry. Why were we so improvidently risk-
ing our ability to maintain our truly vital responsibilities elsewhere in the
world? Why were the pragmatic Americans pursuing an ignis fatuus? If
our judgment were no better than that, could they trust us to protect the
West?

Traveling widely through the United States, as well as Europe and
Asia, I grew increasingly convinced that, even more important than what
other people thought of us, our ef fectiveness as a nation depended on
the Americans’ idea of America. The campuses were in flames. A whole
generation of our youth was being deprived of a proper education and
pushed so far into extremism as to proclaim that their country was no
b etter — an d might even be worse — than the totalitarian powers and that
Ho Chi Minh was a hero compared with the evil men in Washington.
Civil disruption was mounting and spreading; Kent State would incite it
further. The war was destroying our coherence as a nation; if it long
continued, American society would suffer organic damage. It was time
to look hard at what we were doing to ourselves.

Out of mounting frustration, the Nixon Administration flailed about
with neither discipline nor strategic direction — secretly bombing and then
invading Cambodia, attacking in Laos, and scattering bombs all over the
countryside. With the battle cry of upholding our reputation, we
degraded ourselves. No friendly nation applauded our massive use of

The Dusty End of a Reign of Error 413

B-52S; we invited disrespect while proclaiming that the preservation of
respect was our justification for staying in the fight. The vision of the
world’s most powerful nation smashing up the people and meager assets
of a tiny, backward country was not only unedifying, it evoked charges
of colonialist, imperialist, capitalist brutality. Moreover, it damaged our
own self-esteem, since, as the bombing grew more indiscriminate and
desperate, our own vision of our country as strong, generous, humane,
and, above all, civilized was sadly diminished.

Nixons Illusory “Plan”

During the 1968 election campaign, Nixon had repeatedly stated that
he had a “plan” to end the war. But, as Kissinger’s memoirs make clear,
the new Administration had at the beginning no idea where it was going.
Public opposition to the war was growing more strident and violent. Sec-
retary of Defense Laird, with his highly tuned political sensitivities, was
pressing hard for the removal of American forces by phased withdraw-
als, and Nixon accepted that advice in the hope that, by thus reducing
American casualties, we could reconcile the American people to a pro-
tracted war. Meanwhile, commanders in the field were directed to con-
centrate on building up South Vietnamese forces under a program called
“Vietnamization” that the Johnson Administration had initiated at the
beginning of 1968. The third element of the policy was the launching of
an aerial offensive far more intense, reckless, and extensive than any
undertaken before. The calculus of this program was tragically miscon-
ceived and callously misrepresented; it was not designed to get us out of
the war but to keep us in it longer.

I he plan could certainly not bring about Nixon’s announced goal of
a negotiated “peace with honor,” for it violated the most elementary
principles of negotiation. First, a government contemplating negotia-
tions should use its most important bargaining leverage in the most
effective way and at the proper moment and not give it away without a
maximum concession from the other side. Second, a great power should
not link its own bargaining objectives to those of a client state with irrec-
oncilable interests.

7 he First Mistake: Throwing Away Our Bargaining Leverage

North Vietnam’s preeminent objective was to force the United States
to withdraw its troops. Once rid of America’s ground forces, Hanoi’s
leaders were fully confident they could destroy the South Vietnamese
Army (ARVN) no matter how well trained or equipped. Prior to Amer-
ican intervention, the ARVN had proved unable to cope with even Viet
Cong elements when no North Vietnamese contingents were in the

414 The Vietnam Aberration

country; once we withdrew American troops, it could not possibly hold
out long against Hanoi’s armies, which now dominated large parts of the
South. Thus, an offer to withdraw our army was the one really effective
bargaining card we could play to gain even the minimal concessions
needed for extrication. While we still had our full strength of 549,000
men in place, it had high value; once it was clear that we planned to
withdraw forces unilaterally, that value abruptly disappeared.

When Nixon took office, our troop strength was at its maximum and
unilateral withdrawals had been expressly ruled out. On December 29,
1968, less than a month before Nixon’s inauguration, Secretary of
Defense Clark Clifford had stated that “the level of combat is such that
we are building up our troops; not cutting them down.” But — astonish-
ing as it may seem — the Nixon Administration did not even try to trade
with the central resource of its bargaining position, but instead threw it
away, fatuously explaining its unilateral withdrawal of troops with the
same inverted logic that had so often disturbed me during the Johnson
years. Rather than impairing our bargaining position, “withdrawing a
number of American combat troops from Vietnam would,” Nixon stated,
“demonstrate to Hanoi that we were serious in seeking a diplomatic set-
tlement.” 15

I watched these developments with increasing bafflement and despair;
Nixon’s feeble rationalization revealed a total failure to comprehend
Hanoi’s interests or intentions. The amazing esprit of the North Viet-
namese stemmed from the conviction that time was working on their
side. Aware of the tangential character of our own interest in South Viet-
nam, they posited their strategy on the belief that, if they only kept up
fighting long enough, the United States would follow the French prece-
dent: get tired and go home. They obviously knew all about the shrill
and violent opposition to the war building in the United States, and when
Nixon announced the first significant troop withdrawal, they must have
concluded that the end was in sight. By announcing troop withdrawals
before offering realistic concessions we destroyed any hope of an early
settlement. Why should the North Vietnamese seriously negotiate when
they needed only hang on and wait as we got out of the way?

Failing to understand the fanatical intensity of Hanoi’s commitment,
the Nixon Administration wasted the critical early days of the negotia-
tion by demanding mutual withdrawal, which, as I had again and again
pointed out, was a chimera. The North Vietnamese would never yield
possession of the 25 percent of South Vietnamese territory they had
gained by long years of fighting; that for them would mean capitulation.
They would insist that we withdraw unilaterally while their forces
remained in the field. Unhappily, when Kissinger finally recognized this
obvious point, it was too late. By the time he first offered unilateral with-
drawal in October 1970, twenty months had gone by; Nixon had already

The Dusty End of a Reign of Error 415

thrown away the negotiating value of our massive forces in Vietnam by
voluntarily pulling out 150,000 men and announcing that we would
withdraw another 150,000 within a year. The North Vietnamese leaders
could hardly fail but recognize the obvious: the American people would
never permit the President to stop or reverse course. America was tiring
of the war just as France had done in 1954; Hanoi had only to dig in
and wait.

Failing to Separate our Interests from Hanoi s

The second negotiating mistake of the Nixon Administration was its
failure to separate our interests from those of the Saigon government.
That left it in an excruciating nutcracker. The incompatibility of Amer-
ica’s aims with those of the controlling clique in South Vietnam was
obvious: America wanted to get out of the Vietnamese mess with the
least harm to its reputation; while the Saigon government could survive
only if we drove out the North Vietnamese, exterminated the Viet Cong,
and restored its sovereignty over the whole territory of South Vietnam.
When Kissinger acknowledged the reality of America’s predicament and
belatedly offered to withdraw unilaterally, he implicitly recognized that
we would no longer try to meet Saigon’s desiderata. We would never
force the North Vietnamese to withdraw; we would leave them holding
substantial areas of the South. But while we turned our back on Saigon’s
principal war aim, we still did nothing to separate our interests from
those of our client. We continued to pretend schizophrenically that we
were determined to achieve the very objectives we were simultaneously
abandoning, hoping to placate Saigon with assurances we knew would
not be kept.

While still in academic life, just prior to joining the Nixon Adminis-
tration, Professor Kissinger had acknowledged the difficulties of trying
to negotiate for a third party with divergent interests. 16 Nixon and Kis-
singer had little respect for President Thieu; as the negotiations pro-
ceeded and his demands inevitably contradicted their own increasingly
urgent objectives, they made clear their disdain for him, both in their
exchanges with one another and the way they treated him in the days
just prior to the truce agreement. By being forced to bully and cajole
Thieu, they paid the price for failing to establish America’s diplomatic
independence at the outset. But, as I shall point out later, it was not
Nixon who paid the final price but some brave and innocent Americans.

I had — as I have recounted — persistently pointed out to Lyndon
Johnson that our first step in extricating ourselves from the noisome
Vietnam swamp was to demonstrate to the world that the South Viet-
namese regime was failing to live up to the conditions stipulated by Pres-
ident Eisenhower for our continued involvement. I again spelled out

416 The Vietnam Aberration

that thesis in an article in the New York Times Magazine of December 21,
1969, and sent a copy to Henry Kissinger with a note pointing out the
need to move promptly down that road. 17 Though Kissinger wrote back
expressing interest, that was the end of it.

Requiring proof of acceptable performance was more than a diplo-
matic maneuver; it was an obligation American administrations owed
the people. How could we honestly ask young Americans to risk their
lives to help South Vietnam without insisting that its government make
a fully effective effort? Yet the soggy Saigon regime was notoriously fail-
ing even the most elementary standards of performance. President Thieu,
publicly acclaimed by the new Administration (and by its predecessor) as
a heroic and charismatic figure, was, to quote Robert Shaplen (one of
our most astute and experienced Far Eastern experts), “an unpopular,
vacillating and conniving leader who could never pull the country
together, let alone control the bickering members of his own palace
guard.” 18 As for the South Vietnamese army, I need only quote a
description of the ARVN by another highly experienced American: “We
should have asked ourselves long ago how an army can go on function-
ing when it is simply a business organization in which everything is for
sale — from what you eat, to transfer or promotion.” 19

The Kissinger Apologia

In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger contends that the Nixon Adminis-
tration could not, prior to October 1972, have secured the release of our
prisoners in exchange for an American withdrawal, because until that
date, Hanoi insisted on linking military and political questions, maintain-
ing that one could not be solved without the other. “In other words,”
Kissinger concludes, “not even a unilateral United States withdrawal
would end the war or secure the release of our prisoners.” Later he
comments: “Over the years we moved from position to position, from
mutual to unilateral withdrawal, from residual forces to complete depar-
ture. But Hanoi never budged. We could have neither peace nor our
prisoners until we achieved what Hanoi apparently no longer trusted
itself to accomplish: the overthrow of our ally.” 20 Later, Le Due Tho, a
North Vietnamese minister, again told him that “before any negotia-
tions, the United States would have to set a deadline for unilateral with-
drawal . . .; there was no mention of the release of our prisoners of war.” 21

I find Kissinger’s conclusions quite unpersuasive. At no time did he
offer merely to withdraw troops in exchange for prisoners; since he had
failed to separate American interests from Saigon’s, his proposals always
included extraneous provisions to satisfy the South Vietnamese. More-
over — and one cannot blame him for this — even before Kissinger’s first
conversation with the North Vietnamese, Nixon had effectively destroyed

The Dusty End of a Reign of Error 41 7

America’s negotiating position by withdrawing large slices of our army
and announcing that the process would continue. Time was working on
Hanoi’s side; it was getting what it wanted for nothing, so why should it
offer to return our prisoners? Retaining the prisoners would increase
domestic pressures on America to hasten our troop withdrawal, and
meanwhile the prisoners could serve as hostages in case the United States
ever halted withdrawals and tried to reverse course.

When, by October 1972, Hanoi had finally achieved what it wanted —
the withdrawal of American forces — it was quite ready to agree to return
the prisoners since they no longer served a useful purpose. The United
States was no longer a serious obstacle to Hanoi’s final seizure of the
whole of Vietnam. We had only twenty-three thousand troops left in the
country, and, except for the threat of continued bombing (which influ-
enced the North Vietnamese far less than the bombing theologians
believed), America was already out of the war. Unburdening itself of our
prisoners and accepting a cease-fire was then all to Hanoi’s advantage; it
gave it a welcome opportunity to regroup, resupply, and augment its
forces in South Vietnam for the final devastating push against the ARVN,
now demoralized and rendered powerless by America’s departure.

What Might Have Been

Our Vietnamese imbroglio was marked by the errors of judgment
and missed opportunities of three administrations. For years I had
watched us blunder more and more deeply into the wretched mire while
we refused to face the reality of our hopeless predicament. Now once
more we had missed the bus. Had we traded a unilateral withdrawal for
our prisoners when we still had over a half million men in Vietnam, I
have absolutely no doubt we could have gained an agreement for the
return of our prisoners and a cease-fire of perhaps a year. For South
Vietnam, the final outcome would have been no different from what
finally occurred; its overrunning was the preordained final act of the
grisly drama. For America, the difference would have been profound:
we would not have lost an additional twenty thousand young American
lives and would not have killed at least six-hundred-thousand Vietnam-
ese. We would have avoided the opprobrium attached to our bombing
of Laos and invasion of Cambodia and saved far more of our reputation
than we finally salvaged. We would have halted the building up of a
catastrophic social eruption that left a lasting scar on a whole generation
of Americans. We would have kept inflation and the disruption of our
economy at a manageable level.

I never had the slightest doubt that the truce agreements reached in
January 1973 — for which Mr. Kissinger received the Nobel Prize —
assured the extinction of a separate South Vietnam. With American

418 The Vietnam Aberration

troops withdrawn and Hanoi’s forces left occupying large areas of the
South, there was no way a demoralized South Vietnam could hold out.
The political protections in the agreement (the product of months of
haggling) were window dressing. The cease-fire could not possibly hold.
Since the agreement failed even to define the boundaries of the enclaves,
each side was immediately forced to fight to protect and enlarge its own
territorial holdings. Provision for an International Control Commission,
which had been the occasion for endless arguement, was never more than
a charade. Because the commission could report violations only by unan-
imous vote, its Communist members could — and did — assure the com-
mission’s impotence until, finally, the Canadian members quit in disgust.
Thus events quickly demonstrated what should have been clear all along:
protracted horse trading over the elaborate provisions of the agreement
relating to such matters as the DMZ, elections, and so on had been shadow
play. President Thieu seems to have recognized this, but he was power-
less; his fate was in our hands and he had no options. At the end, he
was forced to accede to the final settlement by threat and despair — and
by a Nixon confidence game.

Deceptive Promises

As a result of the failure to separate our interests from Saigon’s Kis-
singer found himself in a hopelessly compromised position. Since he had
abandoned Saigon’s principal war aims, he had to conceal from Thieu
the promises he was secretly making to North Vietnamese Minister Le
Due Tho in Paris. He did not even show Thieu the text of the agreement
he had already initialed with the North Vietnamese representatives in
Paris in October 1972. When concealment proved no longer possible,
Nixon bludgeoned Thieu into line against his better judgment not only
by ultimata but also by promises that could never have been fulfilled.

On November 14, 1972, and January 5, 1973, Nixon sent Thieu secret
letters. He wrote on November 14 that he understood Thieu’s concern
about “the status of North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam” but “far
more important than what we say in the agreement on this issue is what
we do in the event the enemy renews its aggression. You have my abso-
lute assurance that if Hanoi fails to abide by the terms of this agreement
it is my intention to take swift and severe retaliatory action.” 22

Nixon’s second letter stated, “Should you decide, as I trust you will,
to go with us, you have my assurance of continued assistance in the post-
settlement period and that we will respond with full force should the set-
tlement be violated by North Vietnam.” 23 (Italics added.)

What was meant by “full force”? Nuclear bombs? No one will ever
know. To the Congress and the American people, Kissinger insisted in
October and again in January that the Administration had made no

The Dusty End of a Reign of Error 419

“secret agreements.” But what else could one call the two Nixon letters?
“Peace with honor” for Richard M. Nixon had a highly special meaning;
he was, in effect, saying, in the words of the prophet Jeremiah, “peace,
peace, when there is no peace.” Ralph Waldo Emerson had expressed it
succinctly when he wrote, “the louder he talked of his honor the faster
we counted the spoons.” Not only were Nixon’s secret promises illegal,
as McGeorge Bundy has conclusively demonstrated, but they were also
a gross deception of the American people. 24

Nixon had no authority to commit the United States to send back its
bombers and troops, and Congress and the American people would have
rebelled at any request to give him that authority. There was no prece-
dent for a commitment to a foreign government not hedged about by
the normal language of constitutionality. Though Mr. Kissinger suggests
that the President’s secret promises were comparable to those the Carter
Administration later gave in 1979 to reinforce the peace treaty between
Israel and Egypt, McGeorge Bundy has pointed out that Carter’s letters,
far from being assurances of “full force,” simply referred to our coun-
try’s taking — “subject to United States Constitutional processes — such . . .
action as it may deem appropriate.”

Given the degree of Nixon’s megalomania, his extravagant promises
are, in retrospect, hardly surprising. He furtively gave written promises
to Thieu but hid them from Congress and his countrymen. Since he also
hid them from Hanoi, they had no deterrent effect.

Nixon and Kissinger knew that Hanoi had agreed to their so-called
settlement only as a tactical maneuver. In his reports to Nixon during
the latter part of 1972, Kissinger explicitly acknowledged that the truce
they had achieved, far from offering peace, was only a pause before our
further involvement in war.

On December 7, 1972, he advised Nixon from Saigon that “It is now
obvious as the result of our additional exploration of Hanoi’s intentions
that they have not in any way abandoned their objectives or ambitions
with respect to South Vietnam. What they have done is decide to modify
their strategy. . . . Thus, we can anticipate no lasting peace in the wake
of a consummated agreement, but merely a shift in Hanoi’s modus
operandi. We will probably have little chance of maintaining the agree-
ment without evident hair-trigger U.S. readiness, which may in fact be
challenged at any time, to enforce its provisions.” 25

Although Nixon lived in a world of shadows and nightmares, could
he possibly have believed the country would have accepted the indefinite
extension of “hair-trigger . . . readiness”? In 1968 our Senior Advisory
Group had told President Johnson that the American people would not
let the war continue more than another year. Now, four years later, Nixon
was still promising the Vietnamese that our airmen would continue to
fight and die and by the language of his secret letters, implying that our

420 The Vietnam Aberration

troops might even go back in. Could even he have believed that? Amer-
icans were fed up with the war to the verge of nausea; they wanted the
killing stopped.

Kissinger attributes the shattering denouement to Watergate and the
disintegration of the Presidency. He implies that, had Nixon not been
caught in flagrante in impeachable crimes, he could have indefinitely used
our armed forces as his personal chattel, sending our sons to kill and be
killed in Vietnam without the need to consult anyone. I find that a bizarre
distortion of reality. Regardless of Watergate, Americans had had almost
a decade of war and were not about to let it drag on for another decade.
They had washed their hands of Vietnam and would not under any
circumstances approve sending our bombers to resume the carnage in a
tedious, profitless, demanding, repulsive, hopeless, and ultimately
meaningless struggle. 26

I cannot believe that even Richard Nixon in his most megalomaniac
phase was so insensitive as not to understand this. Then why send the
letters to Thieu? My own guess is that, though he foresaw that Congress
would prevent our bombers from flying, a Congressional veto would
absolve him from responsibility; he could blame the final debacle on
Congressional obtuseness and timidity.

All wars are brutalizing and the brutalization of our Vietnamese
struggle extended even to the White House, where our casualties had
become merely a cold statistic. In October 1972, Kissinger and the North
Vietnamese negotiator Le Due Tho signed an understanding intended
as the basis for a final agreement. Though padded out with technical
and political provisions, it was, in practical terms, nothing more than we
could have obtained four years before had we then bargained from a
position of maximum troop strength; nor did we later improve it. Kissin-
ger thought it was the best achievable, and Nixon sent a message stating,
“In my view the October 8 agreement was one which would certainly be
in our interest” and that ‘‘we have no choice but to reach agreement
along the line of the October 8 principles.” Nevertheless, because we had
not established negotiating independence, Nixon let Thieu — for whom
any settlement meant defeat — demand so many modifications of the
October draft that the North Vietnamese broke off negotiations.

Bombing to Improve Syntax

Nixon responded by launching the notorious Christmas bombing
called Linebacker II. It involved sending B-52S over both Hanoi and
Haiphong; the intensive attack lasted twelve days, involving 729 B-52
sorties and about 1000 fighter-bomber attack sorties. More than 20,000
tons of bombs were dropped. How many North Vietnamese casualties
occurred is a matter of dispute (the North Vietnamese claimed at the

The Dusty End of a Reign of Error 421

time that between 1300 and 1600 people had been killed). There was no
doubt that 93 American airmen were missing, with 31 reported cap-
tured, and that we lost 26 planes, including 15 B-52S.

I knew the literature of bombing, ranging back to Julio Douhet, the
Italian who argued in 1921 that bombing could win wars, and I
had been fascinated as an adolescent by the controversial activities of
General Billy Mitchell, a bombing zealot who first showed how to destroy
a battleship from the air. Yet not only had my work with the US Strategic
Bombing Survey shown me the limited effectiveness of bombing, I had
also long been troubled by the fact that, of all forms of warfare, it is the
most impersonal. It enables warriors to kill masses of people anony-
mously without having to confront the results of their macabre handi-
work as was required in classical battles. When we bombed Vietnam,
killing not only soldiers but civilians, we could hardly justify it as
responding to a real and present threat to our country or our institu-
tions. How, then, could a humane people possibly condone Nixon’s
Linebacker operation, which meant death or prison for almost a hundred
patriotic young Americans — as well as death for more than a thousand
North Vietnamese civilians — merely to improve the syntax of an empty
document that any knowledgeable person knew would be flouted by both
sides? The action can be explained only as the frantic striking back of a
power-obsessed leader who had come to regard himself as the sole
repository of American power. Only a man too self-centered to compre-
hend the anguish of the human condition could give an order sending
hundreds to their deaths for a trifling purpose.

Yet no one, including Henry Kissinger, has seriously contended that
the agreement finally attained after Linebacker II was materially better
than the understanding he signed in October 1972. The whole argu-
ment was about irrelevancies: whether a form of words might be regarded
as implying something resembling a coalition government, whether the
Demarcation Zone (DMZ) was a serious frontier, and other trivia. Squalid
politics provides the most charitable explanation for a bloody and oth-
erwise totally irrational act. Kissinger has suggested that Nixon rejected
the agreement reached in Paris in October 1972 primarily because he
wanted to stall; he could have found it politically awkward, just prior to
the 1972 election, to have to defend agreements that could precipitate a
row with Thieu and appear weak to his hard-line supporters. It was the
final penalty for having failed to separate the interests of America from
those of Saigon at the outset. It was no excuse for more killing.

The Unnecessary Tragedy

Though my active participation in the conduct of the Vietnam War
ceased in 1966, I still continue to brood over it. What malign phasing of

4 2 2 The Vietnam Aberration

the moon drove intelligent men in two American administrations to bog
us down in the longest war in our history, not because our country or its
major interests were in danger, but out of a misconceived concern for
“our reputation”? Were our leaders really thinking about the reputation
of our nation or primarily of their own place in history? I find it reveal-
ing that Richard Nixon repeatedly plagiarized Lyndon Johnson’s vain-
glorious boast: “I’m not going to be the first President to lose a war.”
May not that special phrasing tell more about the characters of the two
men than about our posture as a nation? Lyndon Johnson could not face
the consequences of withdrawal, because, in his oversimplified lexicon
of politics, that was the equivalent of personal defeat. Though Richard
Nixon had a golden opportunity to exploit Johnson’s failure by a prompt
settlement in 1969, his vanity and myopia prevented it.

If our Vietnam involvement taught us anything, it is that we should
beware of untested assumptions, or, in other words, that we should pay
far more heed to the “giraffe question”: Why? Today I continue to be
preoccupied with the concern that has haunted me for a decade: Will
historians, assessing what has happened, quote from T. S. Eliot’s Dry
Salvages as I have for the title of this book? Will they note the poet’s
poignant lament: “We had the experience but missed the meaning”? 27

We fought, so we said, for South Vietnam but it was never a coun-
try — merely an artificial slice of territory created by an improvised divid-
ing line as a diplomatic convenience to obtain the 1954 settlement.
Lacking the cohesion, drive, legitimacy, and common purpose of a nation,
South Vietnam had no chance to survive against a cruel, fanatical revo-
lutionary clique in Hanoi that responded to, and was driven by, not
merely a lust for power but an atavistic anticolonialism. Still, myths have
more lives than a cat. Many Americans will continue to argue that we
could have beaten Hanoi had the Johnson Administration fully used the
massive weight of our bombing force from the outset of the war, that we
finally wrung a settlement out of the North Vietnamese only by the
ferocity of our bombing, and that that settlement would have endured
had Congress not cravenly denied Nixon the right to send back our
bombers and troops. To those who solace themselves with such wishful
thoughts I would only repeat the Duke of Wellington’s famous reply
when a stranger approached him on the street with the greeting, “Mr.
Robinson, I believe.” To that the Duke responded, “If you believe that,
Sir, you can believe anything.”

T. S. Eliot announced no fresh discovery when he wrote that
“Humankind cannot stand too much reality.” Myths are an age-old form
of escape, and they rarely fade completely; people will continue to believe
what they want to believe: the South could have won the Civil War if
Secretary of the Treasury Memminger had adopted better financial pol-
icies or Lee had pursued a better military strategy; Napoleon need not

The Dusty End of a Reign of Error 423

have lost at Waterloo; Lenin would never have succeeded had Kerensky
been bolder and more incisive, etcetera ad infinitum.

Lord Vansittart, the Permanent Under Secretary of the British For-
eign Office, tried for years prior to 1939 to warn his colleagues of the
Nazi menace, but he could not, as he put it, “induce the unwilling to
accept the inevitable.” My own efforts were not of the same magnitude,
yet I found some comfort in that phrase, as well as a profound poig-
nancy in Vansittart’s conclusion: “There is a wonderful continuity in the
Western tragedy.” Our protracted involvement in the Vietnam War was
an authentic tragedy— perhaps the most tragic error in American his-
tory. Not only was it bloody and unnecessary but it led us to actions that
betrayed our principles as a nation. And we have not yet done with it;
traces of its evil spoor still defile our economic, social, and political life.

I can only conclude, as I wrote in 1976,

we dare not let the revisionists distort the real meaning of our Vietnam adven-
ture, or we shall have learned nothing. In spite of individual feats of devotion
and valor which this time were largely unsung — no one but a fanatic could
regard our involvement in that war as a bright page in our history. We should,
instead, pay heed to Churchill’s famous comment to the House of Commons on
April 4, 1940, following the evacuation of Dunkirk: “We must be careful not to
assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory.” For, however one may try
to justify it, it was a tragic defeat for America. Not in the military terms of the
battlefield, but a defeat for our political authority and moral influence abroad
and for our sense of mission and cohesion at home. A defeat not because our
initial purposes were unworthy or our intentions anything less than honorable,
but because — in frustration and false pride and our innocence of the art of
extrication we were forced to the employment of excessively brutal means to
achieve an equivocal objective against a poor, small, backward country.

I hat is something the world will be slow to forgive, and we should be slow to
forget. 28

PART VIII

The Private
Sector

27. The Decision to Resign

Once we were engaged in all-out war, diplomacy moved into
the shadows. Though my civilian colleagues continued to look over the
shoulders of the generals — fascinated by military tactics and the opera-
tional aspects of warfare — the day-to-day conduct of the war was largely
out of their hands. To be sure, our would-be Clausewitzes still gathered
in innumerable bureaucratic meetings, endlessly searching for the elu-
sive keys to victory. But I thought the schemes they evolved more like
the writhings of a decapitated chicken than rational strategy. Few any
longer believed their own fantasies. The zest had gone out of the game.
The war had become stylized; its tired players went through the motions,
talking the familiar jargon because withdrawal was a dirty word.

My Increasing Futility

I watched all this with melancholy and a growing conviction that I
could no longer play a useful part. Their single-minded concentration
on the goal of pounding the North Vietnamese into capitulation was, I
felt, stultifying my colleagues for whom 1 had not only great intellectual
respect but very real affection. They seemed to be seeing the world as a
pre-Cimabue painting, lacking both perspective and proportion. Where
Vietnam seemed to me a tiny piece of real estate of limited strategic
interest ten thousand miles away, the mental maps they used to chart
our policy portrayed it as a vast menacing continent hanging over
America. It was as though, following a geologic convulsion, a hostile Asia
had drifted within a few miles of California and was threatening our
national existence. I was reminded of the king in the musical The King
and I, who insisted that Siam was the largest nation in the world.

The Decision to Resign 425

As I was not an armchair military theorist and had never believed
for a moment we could win, I devoted my time and attention to other
areas of the world where vital American interests were genuinely
involved. Even that was no longer satisfying because I found it practi-
cally impossible to interest the distracted President in any major new
initiative. The war was a vampire sucking dry the Administration’s vital-
ity and setting us at odds with other friendly governments.

My job had lost its savor, and, as our involvement in the Vietnam
nightmare had passed the point where I could significantly influence
policy, it was time to resign. The decision was not “agonizing,” to use
Mr. Dulles’s favorite phrase. After six intense years in the diplomatic
pressure cooker, I was depleted — physically, mentally, morally, and
financially. It had been a period of concentrated though (until Vietnam)
highly rewarding labor; during the whole time, I had been away from
the State Department (other than on negotiating trips) for only a little
over thirty days out of more than two thousand — and I was tired. Dean
Rusk and I worked on virtually the same schedule. Saturdays, Sundays,
and even holidays were part of a gray continuum — indistinguishable ex-
cept that on Saturday nights Virginia Rusk and Ruth Ball ritualistically
laid out colored shirts for Dean and me to wear to work the next day. It
was our means of keeping track.

Flagging spirits had produced a diminishing exuberance. A year or
so before, when confronted with a challenging problem, I would have
felt the adrenalin surge and urgently set about mobilizing the State
Department s resources in search of a solution. Now I was inclined to
greet new problems warily and wearily, indulging the squalid hope that
if let alone, they might cure themselves. Nor did I have the same confi-
dence in my judgment; I was too tired always to seek the tough-minded,
difficult answer and to struggle for the support of preoccupied col-
leagues.

I left the Department on September 30, 1966. The following Thurs-
day, the President and Mrs. Johnson gave a farewell party for Ruth and
me, attended by all the members of the cabinet, and the next morning
we flew to Milan. During a fortnight on Lake Como at the Villa Serbel-
loni, I began work on a book, later published as The Discipline of Power.

I hen, after ten more days at a friend’s villa on the sea, we drove about
in Sicily on a holiday. I needed time to clear my mind.

What deeply preoccupied me then— and still does— was how our
country could have blundered into the Vietnam mess. Would we have
followed a different course under a different leader? Richard Nixon
compounded all of Lyndon Johnson’s mistakes and added many of his
own, and, in view of his consistently hawkish record, I am convinced that
had he won the 196° election, he would have got us into trouble even
more quickly and deeply. But that does not resolve the fundamental

4 26 The Private Sector

enigma of Lyndon Johnson — the most conspicuous Vietnam War cas-
ualty. Though a spate of books have tried to explain Johnson’s complex-
ities, I put little stock in the armchair psychologists who analyze the
psyches of political leaders with pretentious and nauseating jargon. I can
give only a personal view of Johnson that is necessarily incomplete, with
little conviction that my observations will add much to history.

One element that reinforced LBJ’s failure to face reality in Vietnam
was his sense of educational inferiority. He was overly impressed by the
academic credentials of the men he had inherited from a particularly
glamorous administration, sometimes expressing his sense of inferiority
with, it seemed to me, a kind of silent, scornful envy, “God damn it, I
made it without their advantages and now they’re all working for me!”
If his lack of confidence in his own intellectual sophistication made him
uncritically respectful of some of their advice, it also made him vulner-
able to erudite sycophancy and specious historical analogies.

On December 29, 1963, President Johnson, McGeorge Bundy, and I
were breakfasting on the terrace of President Johnson’s ranch on the
Pedernales. Chancellor Erhard of Germany was that morning’s captive
audience, and, as he often did, the President began boasting of his chief
advisers (without, of course, mentioning that almost all of them were
part of his bequest from President Kennedy).

“No head of state,” he said, “ever had such a galaxy of talent. Dean
Rusk — well, he was a Rhodes Scholar, a professor, then head of the
Rockefeller Foundation. Bob McNamara was a professor at Harvard [he
had been, in fact, an instructor at the Harvard Business School], then he
ran the Ford Motor Company. Mac Bundy, here, is my in-house Ph.D.
He was Dean up at Harvard.” Then — looking at me — he said as a kind
of afterthought, “I’ll tell you something else, Chancellor, George Ball’s
an intellectual, too.” I let the remark go at the moment, not wishing to
confuse Erhard, the prototypical German professor. But later in the
morning when I was alone with the President, I said to him, “You know,
at breakfast you called me an intellectual. With all due respect, Mr. Pres-
ident, those are fighting words where I come from, and I hope you’ll
never say that to me again.” He laughed and slapped me on the back
and said, “I know you’re not one of those smart-ass eggheads.”

Lyndon Johnson understood America but little of foreign countries
or their history. He knew about the poor and needy and the politics of
farms and cities, but not about revolution in the Asian rice paddies. Had
the war not occurred, he could have been a great President; instead, he
must remain an ambiguous and compromised figure. During the Ken-
nedy Administration, he had been exposed to the problems of South-
east Asia only tangentially; President Kennedy had never brought him
into his close counsels. He had strongly opposed the call for America’s
intervention to help the French in 1954, but, imbued with the spirit of a

The Decision to Resign 427

fighting Texan, he had consistently expressed a hard line. As Vice-Pres-
ident in May 1961, he had returned from Vietnam announcing that the
decision we faced was vital, 1 and he went on to say that “The battle against
Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia with strength and deter-
mination to achieve success there — or the United States, inevitably, must
surrender the Pacihc and take up our defenses on our own shores.” 2

He had liked Diem when they had met in Vietnam in 1961, and that
personal impression had colored his view of the war, since he habitually
thought of relations between governments in terms of personalities.
Added to that was an instinctive feeling of the loyalty one politician owed
another as co-members of an international self-protective association and
the politician’s occupational addiction to hyperbole. Thus, I shuddered
deeply when in Honolulu in 1966, Johnson had embraced Ky and Thieu
as “two brave leaders of the Vietnamese Republic,” and, working himself
up to an extravagant frenzy, had lashed out at critics of his policy, whom
he described as “special pleaders who counsel retreat in Vietnam” and
who belong “to a group that has always been blind to experience and
deaf to hope. We cannot accept their logic that tyranny ten thousand
miles away is not tyranny to concern us — or that subjugation by an armed
minority in Asia is different from subjugation by an armed minority in
Europe.”

His reactions all too often confirmed my strong belief that American
Presidents or Vice-Presidents should never be permitted outside the
country without firm and experienced keepers. Freed from the con-
straining influence of a skeptical press and alert and well-briefed advis-
ers, enjoying adulation and the stimulus of a foreign clime, they all too
often lose focus and talk nonsense. 3

To Lyndon Johnson, Diem was our man; we had created him and in
Johnson’s view, we should not have let the odious activities of his brother
and sister-in-law deflect us from giving him our continued support. Thus
he deplored the Kennedy Administration’s encouragement of the coup
as a major mistake, and I think he saw it as bad luck that he should take
of fice just after the overthrow of Diem. By the time of his Presidency,
the situation in Saigon had grown increasingly sticky, and Americans
were required, every few weeks, to learn a new cast of actors with odd-
sounding Oriental names. That was far too exotic for Lyndon Johnson.

Haunted by thoughts of their place in history, all Presidents drama-
tize themselves. Lyndon Johnson was particularly susceptible to tempta-
tion, as he demonstrated when he romanticized his hardships and
struggle for his diligent Boswell, Doris Kearns. 4 Posturing and distorting
facts, he sought to create a self-portrait poignantly colored with virtue,
pathos, and heroism. By then, of course, he was out of power, and it was
merely good fun; but I have no doubt it had affected his judgment to
hear Walt Rostow compare him to Abraham Lincoln after the Wilder-

428 The Private Sector

ness Campaign or at some other dark point in the Civil War, when,
bedeviled by the opposition, agonizing over the bloodshed, he still
indomitably carried on the struggle. Johnson had little patience with a
I olstoyan view of history. History was heroes, and I suspect he thought
of himself in the Vietnam context not so much as Abraham Lincoln but
as Davy Crockett, fighting to avenge the Alamo, which — like Vietnam in
1966 — had more symbolic than strategic value.

Even though Johnson was overly impressed by elegantly educated
men, he might have steered a wiser Vietnam course had his erudite
counsellors not all given him the same advice. As I have pointed out
earlier, each of his top civilian advisers — Dean Rusk, Bob McNamara,
McGeorge Bundy, and the CIA chief, John McCone — was firmly con-
vinced, at least initially, that we could win the war. Later, even after it
had become clear to at least some of them that we could not win, they
were unanimous in believing that we could not afford the costs of getting
out. Each had his own honorable reasons for reaching these conclu-
sions — reasons that reflected temperament, education, and experience.

To have stood against this monolithic advice would have required a
man with almost fanatical self-assurance — and that was not Lyndon
Johnson, who, as I saw him, was tortured by doubts. I had sympathy for
his predicament. Should he accept the urgings of a deputy adviser against
the unanimous opinion of his most trusted ministers? I thought often
during this period that had anyone of the top group — the Secretary of
State, Secretary of Defense, or the national security adviser — joined me
in promoting a withdrawal, the President might at least have held back
from a massive commitment. But my colleagues were all pushing the
other way and they surrounded him.

It would be unfair in this context not to mention Kenneth Galbraith,
who had cautioned President Kennedy against a deep involvement. Nor
should I omit reference to Arthur Goldberg, who in 1966 — about a year
after he had become ambassador to the United Nations — began to press
for moderating policies. In the nature of things, he could be only of
limited effectiveness; in spite of rhetoric to the contrary, the ambassador
to the United Nations is not, nor for geographical reasons can he be, in
the mainstream of policy. Besides, Goldberg marred his own advocacy
by insisting to the President that he, too, had a constituency, thus implic-
itly threatening the President’s own position, which was no way to treat
a Texan. I was fully aware of the President’s anger and resentment at
that suggestion; Johnson spoke to me of it in scatological terms.

In addition, some officials at a slightly lower level went a long way
toward concluding that the war could not be won. I would include in
that list William P. Bundy, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern
Affairs, as well as John McNaughton, the Assistant Secretary of Defense
for International Security Affairs, and Chester Cooper in the White

The Decision to Resign 429

House. But they had all invested years of effort in the war and I could
understand their reluctance to face what I considered the ultimate ques-
tion: Should we let our young men continue to kill and be killed in an
essentially hopeless cause or seek a way out with the least damage possi-
ble? Finally, and he was very important, there was Clark Clifford but,
until 1967, he was nonofficial. Not until he had become Secretary of
Defense some months after my departure could he effectively advocate
shutting down the war.

Off-key with the prevailing melody, my voice seemed inevitably
cacophonous and I have no inflated view as to its effectiveness. I like to
think that I somewhat slowed down the escalation and I comfort myself
with the improvable speculation that without my intervention we might
have lunged forward even faster into the catastrophic mess in which we
finally found ourselves. Even so, I provided no more than a marginal
constraint on the momentum.

In the two-dimensional portrait of Johnson frequently passed off as
authentic, he is portrayed as a man intolerant of dissent. When I made
my first cautionary comments and wrote my first dissenting memoranda,
I was not sure how he would react. He had always treated me with warmth
and courtesy; only once had he spoken with any hint of acerbity, and
that was very early in our relationship — a few months after he became
President. On the night of March 31, 1964, when Dean Rusk was away
and I was Acting Secretary, a revolution in Brazil overthrew President
Goulart, who was reported to be fleeing the country. From our
point of view, almost any change would be an improvement over Gou-
lart, who was not only bankrupting Brazil but had shown strong pro-
Communist sympathies.

I was monitoring events at the State Department, and in the early
hours of the morning we began to receive earnest pleas from Ambassa-
dor Lincoln Gordon in Brasilia for a message of encouragement to the
new regime. Impressed by the urgency of Gordon’s telegrams and after
checking as much as was then possible with the Department’s Latin
American specialists, I authorized a telegram that, in effect, endorsed
the coup.

The next morning, the President asked why I had acted without
advising him. I told him it had been 3 a.m. and I had not wanted to
waken him. “Besides,” I said, “it was the right step to take and it’s worked
out well.” To that he replied, “Don’t ever do that again. I don’t give a
damn whether you were right or wrong. I don’t care a fuck that it was
three in the morning; I want to know what’s being done whatever time
of night it may be.”

I took him literally and was right to do so. From then on, hardly a
month went by that I did not wake him once or twice at two or three or
four o clock in the morning to advise him of some new occurrence. His

4^0 The Private Sector

response was always the same. “What do you propose we do, George?” I
would then describe the action I intended to take — if he approved. With-
out exception, he would respond, “That sounds right. Go ahead,” invar-
iably adding, “and thank you very much for waking me and letting me
know.”

In the course of my Vietnam apostasy, I found him often my only
friendly listener. After almost every meeting during which I had
expressed strong — and, I thought, cogent — opposition to some new
measure of escalation, or simply made a passionate argument in favor
of withdrawal, the President would take me aside. Putting his arm around
my shoulder and his face within three inches of mine — his curious, slightly
embarrassing habit when he was trying to make a point — he would say,
“George, I can’t tell you how I thank you for disagreeing with me. I need
you to argue with me and I like your stubbornness; keep it up. I’m grate-
ful to you.” Some of the more cynical Johnson-haters contend that I was
taken in and that the President was simply trying to neutralize me, but I
never doubted his sincerity — nor, I think, did any of my close colleagues.
My belief that Lyndon Johnson was prepared — even eager — to read or
listen to my skeptical thoughts was not based merely on my own obser-
vation. He not only discussed my views with members of his immediate
staff, such as Moyers or Valenti, but almost every time I sent him a dis-
senting memorandum he would call me the following morning. I had,
he would say, spoiled his sleep, and we must immediately get together
to discuss what I had written. Then, when we met and I had made an
often lengthy argument, he would begin a cross-examination: “On page
seventeen you argue such-and-such, how do you defend and support
that?” Or, “What do you mean by saying so-and-so on page thirty-two?”

Decision to Resign

Knowledge of my dissent from Administration policy was closely held.
But I did have two old friends in the press to whom I could expose my
anxieties in total confidence — Walter Lippmann and James (Scotty) Res-
ton, of the New York Times. As America’s involvement deepened and ten-
sions increased, President Johnson began to chide me about my long,
close friendship with Lippmann, “Tell your friend, Walter, that there’s
a war on,” he would say. Or “Are you telling Lippmann what to write or
is he telling you what to say?” Though he made the comments with a
teasing smile, one could detect an overtone of malice — hostility toward
Lippmann but never, I believe, toward me.

Scotty Reston understood my predicament and was, I thought, sym-
pathetic with my decision to continue my delaying action within the four
walls of the Administration so long as I was being heard. If he disap-
proved he did not say it. But I disappointed Lippmann. “I don’t under-

The Decision to Resign 431

stand you, he would say. “Feeling as you do, you should resign and
make your opposition public.” The advice troubled me but, so long as
there seemed a chance to slow the escalation, I never felt tempted to
take it. Lippmann and I conducted a running argument on the question,
which caused some slight cloud on our friendship. I answered him by
pointing out that, throughout his long years of writing, he had dispar-
aged protests that did not help a cause. To raise hell merely for the
psychic glow and the adulation of the already persuaded — actions that
did not advance what one was trying to achieve — that, I argued, was
mere self-indulgence and unworthy of a serious man. What mattered
was to do that which was likely to have the greatest tangible, beneficial
effect.

I here has long been — and there still is — a romantic vision of the
hero who dramatically resigns on a point of principle and denounces his
colleagues. I he examples cited are mostly drawn from British prece-
dents and reflect a fundamental distinction between Presidential and
parliamentary systems. A minister is a member of the British cabinet
because he has a political base in the country; if he resigns from the
government, his action has substantial political repercussions. He still
has clout within his party and retains the House of Commons as his
forum. Except in rare cases, the head of an American department (or in
my case, merely a deputy head) is little more than a hired hand of the
President. I had not become the Under Secretary of State because of an
independent position within the Democratic party. Were I to resign it
would be a non-event — at the most a one-day wonder.

The Basis for Decision

I hus, judged by any standard of effectiveness, I did not see my res-
ignation serving a useful purpose. I was doing, I thought, an effective
job in the Department of State, looking after a number of problems that
would otherwise have been neglected. Vietnam was for me always a side-
issue; the more time that Secretary of State Rusk spent on Vietnam —
and Vietnam increasingly absorbed his energies — the greater was my
responsibility for problems in other parts of the world.

Moreover, I could always have my day in court and that was the
most important consideration. The President heard me and, were I to
leave, he would not hear the same views from anyone else. So why should
I quit? By leaving the government and denouncing the Administration
for carrying on a futile struggle, I would not make the war shorter or
less futile. I could hold a press conference or two and make a few
speeches, but that would be the end of it. The official leakers in the
White House would let it be widely known that I had quit to avoid being
fired. The President, they would whisper, had long been dissatisfied with

45 2 The Private Sector

my performance; the press would give wide currency to those off-the-
record innuendoes, and most people would believe them. My dissent
would be written off as disappointment or sour grapes.

How, then, should 1 balance the advantages of a resignation against
the utility of what I was doing? I had no illusions as to my effect on
events; I might slow, but I could not stop, the escalation. I could not
force the President to cut our losses and retire — only events could do
that — but I could certainly lay the basis for that decision. Were I to leave
there would be no restraints and no alternatives.

These were some of the reasons why I did not leave early in 1966, or
even in 1965 when we first committed our ground forces to combat, but
by September 1966 there seemed little reason to stay longer. I would go
quietly. The effectiveness of my opposition to the war while in the gov-
ernment — or even my ability to retain the ear of the President — had
depended on Johnson’s confidence that I would never betray or embar-
rass him. That was the condition on which 1 could continue to partici-
pate in discussions and have access to the intelligence information that
enabled me to argue my case with some authority.

Questions of Principle

Anyone embarking on a career of opposition necessarily gives tacit
hostages. I could not share the confidence of my colleagues for a sus-
tained period, then go out and denounce them. That well-understood
principle was also well-founded. If everyone disliking a governmental
position felt compelled to quit and attack his colleagues, orderly govern-
ment would become impossible. The fear of defection and attack from
outside would lead to the suppression of dissenters and the discourage-
ment of dissent, and that would narrow any President’s vision. Finally,
there was a question of style. I respected my colleagues as men of integ-
rity, who were trying to do what they thought best for their country.
Should I make their tasks more difficult by using privileged information
to oppose them and thus force them to take even more obdurate posi-
tions? More than once 1 recalled Acheson’s quiet resignation as Under
Secretary of the Treasury.

Thus, in resigning in September 1966, I did not consider that I was
leaving over a principle. How could I publicly attack the war without
giving aid and comfort to the enemy? Men were dying in the rice pad-
dies, pilots were risking their lives. I had an old-fashioned aversion to
undercutting them. I felt deep sympathy for the young men required to
fight a war in which they did not believe, but I was repelled by the hys-
teria and crudity of the antiwar movement and disgusted with the weak-
ness of university administrations that failed miserably to protect the
integrity of their own institutions. Simply put, I did not want to be a

The Decision to Resign 433

hero of the yippies; I had too much respect for our constitutional system
to wish it to be undermined. I would not join those fatuous intellectuals
who felt that issues were better settled in the streets than through estab-
lished organs of government. That was the real trahison des clercs.

So far as I know, the issue of resignation has never been seriously
addressed by anyone with more than an academic acquaintance with the
problem. The books that discuss the question have, it seems to me, failed
to comprehend the nuances of resignation under a Presidential system
or to show much appreciation of how our government really operates.
It is a subject worth more serious study. What, for example, should be
the triggering event? It would be absurd for anyone in a cabinet-level
position to quit whenever he found himself required to carry out a policy
he did not like. Compromise is the heart of our democratic system, and
even the President cannot completely impose his will on policy; he must
qualify his views in ways he often finds distasteful and carry out laws of
which he disapproves. Should I, for example, have resigned because I
opposed President Johnson’s refusal to quarrel with General de Gaulle
or what our government was doing in the Dominican Republic or dis-
liked President Kennedy’s insistence on protecting the textile industry?
At what point does an issue become so central and significant as to war-
rant a resignation? I shall leave the subject for others to discuss, noting
only that it is by no means as simple and incisive as it is sometimes made
to appear.

Catastrophic as it was, our involvement in Vietnam was probably
inevitable. It marked the end of an uncritical globalism that reflected
our postwar preeminence. We felt — and for a time with justice — that we
commanded the resources and responsibility to serve as policemen to
the world. But by the sixties we had, it seemed to me, reached the point
where we could not forever maintain such an expansive interpretation of
our commitments. On this I totally agreed with Walter Lippmann’s cen-
tral theme that we must reduce commitments to the dimensions of our
resources.

I oday I think we probably are doing this reasonably well, yet we
have not overcome other consequences of Vietnam — the poisoning of
the minds of some Americans toward their own government and the
warped attitude of other governments toward America.

Piling Watergate on Vietnam was history’s revenge for America’s
hubris.

434

The Private Sector

l8. The Private Sector -With East
River Interlude

I spent the year 1967 traveling extensively in the Far East and
Europe in connection with my investment banking activities as a partner
of Lehman Brothers, but my time was not devoted exclusively to private
business. In March 1967, at the request of President Johnson (who was
fulfilling a promise to President Park Chung Hee), I organized a mission
of American industrialists to visit Korea and explore opportunities for
American direct investment in that country. With the invaluable help of
Tristan E. Beplatt, an experienced banker who knew Korea well, I put
together a group of some twenty chief executives of major companies.
Ruth and several other wives joined the party, and we spent from March
17 through March 25 in South Korea and the Philippines. Korea, the
delegation found, had much to offer American industry — an abundance
of educable, low-cost labor and a government committed to free market
principles and eager for foreign investment. It would be too much to
suggest that our investment mission gave a major spur to Korea’s phe-
nomenal economic growth, but it did result in several substantial Amer-
ican investments.

I had been back in the United States only about two months when I
again received a summons from the White House. 1 his one by luck I
was able to avoid. I had gone to Chicago on June 5. Early in the morn-
ing, the national security adviser, Walt Rostow, telephoned to ask, “Do-
you know there’s a war on?” I muttered something incoherent, and he
then told me that the Israelis were moving out across the desert and that
the President wanted McGeorge Bundy and me in Washington that
afternoon.

I explained that I had a speech to make that noon and another in
the evening and it was too late to cancel those engagements, so we let
the matter drop. Mac Bundy, less fortunate than I, was trapped in Wash-
ington for several weeks as executive secretary of the Special Committee
of the National Security Council for the Middle East Crisis — an ExCom
group roughly similar to the one we had set up for the Cuban Missile
Crisis. Bundy was superbly equipped to handle the task and I was not
sure where, in any event, I could have fitted in, so I was happy to have
avoided that particular draft.

Coronation of the Shah

Later in the year, as guests of Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveida
(a man of charm and wit, brutally killed by the Khomeini regime in

The Private Sector — With East River Interlude 433

* 979 )’ Ruth and I attended the coronation of the Shah of Iran. The
coronation ceremony was both impressive and depressing, with obtru-
sive contradictions and pretensions. Reflected in the mirrored walls of
the Golestan Palace the Shah let one bejeweled belt drop to the floor,
only to don another emblazoned with an emerald large as a hen’s egg.
Thereafter he crowned first himself, then the Empress. It was pure/<zc-
tice a flamboyant attempt to give bogus legitimacy to his parvenu Pah-
lev i Dynasty. Any suggestion of an Islamic tradition was, we remarked
to one another, rigidly avoided; the Shah was seeking not to identify his
forty-year-old dynasty with Iran’s rulers later than the eighth century,
but to establish a continuum with the great dynasts of the days of Persia’s
classical glory, Cyrus and Darius. The skill and demanding labor that
the jewelers Arpels of Paris lavished on fashioning the crowns seemed
to me, as a Middle-Western American, an outrageous misdirection of
talent and energy. Because the jewels — each derived from a different
crown or ornament of some forgotten Indian mogul — were penetrated
by holes bored for some prior purpose, each required its own diameter
of connecting wire, and that meant months of painstaking work.

1 hough the garish affair was played straight it still had the atmo-
sphere of operetta. We waited expectantly for the Empress to burst into
an Of fenbach aria or the Shah to shuffle smartly into a soft-shoe routine.
Seated before the Peacock Throne in the Golestan Palace, dressed at
eight in the morning in white tie and tails complete with medals, I felt
absurd. I did not like playing a crowd scene role in a sinfully wasteful bit
of Oriental satire. To complete the effect, Ruth and other female mem-
bers of our diplomatic section were required to wear long-sleeved floor-
length pastel dresses, while the ladies of the Royal Family were clothed
in white satin, with all — including the three-year-old princess — pro-
tected from the weather by diamond and emerald tiaras. Yet even they
were outdone by the Empress, who, embellished with a velvet robe
embroidered with gold and seeded with pearls, patiently dragged a train
twenty feet long.

What an absurd, bathetic spectacle! The son of a colonel in a Per-
sian Cossack regiment play-acting as the emperor of a country with an
average per capita income of $250 per year, proclaiming his achieve-
ments in modernizing his nation while accoutered in the raiments and
symbols of ancient despotism. No wonder we talked among ourselves
about the fragility of an anachronistic structure that compounded the
doubtful life expectancy of an absolute monarch with wasteful display.
It was, I thought, a deliberate insult to the wretchedly poor with whom
the country abounded. Still, though the prodigality of Versailles had
nothing on the Golestan Palace, the greatest affront was not to come
until four years later. Then the Shah and his queen spent $120 million
on an opulent pageant at Persepolis that enriched not Omar the Tent-

43 6 The Private Sector

maker but Pierre the Tentmaker and the other luxury merchants of
Paris who handled the arrangements. A few minor heads of state showed
up to keep company with Spiro Agnew, but the world was either too
polite or too humorless to laugh.

The Pueblo Incident

Though firmly committed to private life, I still remained on call. On
January 23 of the following year, the North Koreans seized the USS
Pueblo , an American naval vessel engaged in electronic and communi-
cation intelligence (ELINT and COMMINI). Two days later, on Jan-
uary 25, President Johnson asked me to chair a committee to try to find
out how this incident could have occurred and what steps should be
taken to prevent future events of the same kind. The committee
appointed by the President contained a number of distinguished mili-
tary experts, including among others, General Mark Clark, General
Lawrence Kuter, and Admiral George Anderson. We reviewed the evi-
dence for several days, seeking to cast light on such questions as whether
the Pueblo had, indeed, strayed into North Korean waters and why the
whole affair had been so clumsily handled. Then, at the end, I drafted
a report and negotiated it sentence by sentence with my committee.
Greatly to my surprise, we unanimously agreed on a draft that raised
serious doubts as to the exact position of th e Pueblo, was severely critical
of the planning, organization and, direction of the whole enterprise, and
recommended a number of measures to avoid a similar disaster.

I sent the report to the President, who asked me to review it with
Clark Clifford. Clifford and I agreed that the written document should
be destroyed and I should report only orally to the President. Were we
to submit a written report it would probably leak to the newspapers, and
its expressions of doubt, particularly with regard to the location of the
Pueblo , might embarrass our government in dealing with North Korea.
I located all copies of the document and destroyed them so completely
that I did not even keep a copy for my own files. I am quite certain that
none exists anywhere.

Appointment to the United Natioyis

On April 24, 1968, President Johnson telephoned me while I was
attending a meeting of the board of directors of the Standard Oil Com-
pany of California in San Francisco. Arthur Goldberg, he told me, had
resigned as ambassador to the United Nations, and he wanted me to take
the job for the balance of the year — until a new President could be sworn
in. I explained that I had only just become a partner of Lehman Broth-

The Private Sector — With East River Interlude 43 j

ers and I could not leave my partners immediately after joining the firm.
He applied his usual powers of persuasion, but I stood fast. He made
me promise, however, not to give him a firm refusal but to “reflect on
the matter overnight’’ and call him the next day.

The next morning I telephoned the President to tell him that I had
talked with my partners and still felt I could not accept the proposed
appointment. I had only begun to reestablish myself after six years in
the government; I needed to learn a new trade and restore my finances.
He replied that he understood. He regretted having to impose on me,
but, he said, he wanted nothing more than peace. Because of this he had
decided not to run for reelection. “I need you, George. No one else ever
disagreed with me as much as you but I need you.” I held my ground. I
mentioned again that I had discussed the question with my partners,
who felt as I did. Finally, Johnson said to me, “George, if I wanted to
explain the situation to your partners, whom should I call?” I should
have known then that 1 had lost. Not two minutes elapsed before the
telephone rang again. This time it was Dean Rusk, “George, the Presi-
dent is not going take no for an answer. Now he’s told me to call you
and lean on you. You might just as well give in gracefully. You’re going
to the United Nations.”

I he next day Edwin Weisl, a partner who was close both to the chair-
man of my firm, Robert Lehman, and to the President, told me that the
President had called him and made a strong plea. “He really needs you,
George.” When my other partners admonished me not to turn down the
President, my negotiating posture was destroyed; I could no longer in-
sist on my obligation to my firm.LBJ had surrounded me.

My highly qualified views of the United Nations were well known, so
I was not surprised at some of the mail I received. Dean Acheson wrote
me, I always thought you were one of the brightest guys in town, but
now I’m reserving a room for you at St. Elizabeth’s,” adding in a post-
script, “This will teach you not to play poker with a Texan.” John Ken-
neth Galbraith wrote to express his “bafflement” at my “curious career
pattern.”

I was annoyed to have been out maneuvered. I needed a period of
private life to restore my fortunes, and the last post I wanted was the
United Nations. I recalled all too well the night Ruth and I had spent
trying to persuade Adlai Stevenson to accept the UN post, and all the
arguments he had made for rejecting it, which I had thought valid. But
for his own peace of mind Adlai needed to stay in the public sector, I
did not. For six years, I had been almost daily on the telephone giving
instructions to our UN mission in New York, and, apart from Adlai Ste-
venson, I was, I suspect, the only American ambassador to the United
Nations who knew in advance the sterility and limitations of the job.

438 The Private Sector

United Nations ambassadors spend most of their time making speeches
about abstractions and haggling over nuances in resolutions that have
no practical effect. I have never had a taste for scholastic nitpicking, and
because the United Nations has become little more than a “talking shop,”
the very atmosphere of the institution oppresses me. I was spoiled by too
many years of active participation in critical decisions at the top reaches
of the State Department.

Fortunately, I did not have to assume my new duties promptly. Under
the rotational system of the Security Council, Arthur Goldberg was
scheduled to be the next Council President and he wished to stay through
his tenure in that office. Thus, I did not actually take over responsibility
until June. Nor did Ruth and I bother to move to the embassy residence
in the Waldorf-Astoria Towers. Only a few weeks earlier, we had bought
a duplex apartment on the top two floors of the United Nations Plaza —
a large new building almost next door to the United Nations itself. We
had a spectacular view looking north up both the East and Hudson Riv-
ers and west at the whole brilliant skyline of uptown New York, with the
buildings changing colors as the afternoon sun created a shifting pattern
of lights and shadows. So we used the Waldorf residence only for official
entertaining.

Working on the East River

My new job was exactly as I knew it would be. Though I went to
Washington every week and sat in on meetings, I was a bit player rather
than a major actor. I could make noises — sometimes critical noises — off-
stage, but the important roles were played by those with direct respon-
sibility for policy and its execution.

For many years, a large part of the business of the Security Council
has concerned the quarrel between Israel and the Arab states. When
either side brings some new incident of outrage or violence before the
Security Council, there is little to be done except paraphrase a standard
speech that consists of deploring the actions of each side. Toward the
end of my stay in the United Nations, those ritualistic exercises became
so routine and tiresome that once, when Israel’s United Nations repre-
sentative called me in the early morning to request an urgent meeting
of the Security Council to consider some new incident, I wearily replied
that I did not think the Security Council was a “precinct police station.”
By the time I reached the UN mission three hours later, my comment
had preceded me.

During July, when the Security Council was quiet, I paid an official
visit to the Middle East, then took a brief trip to the Far East. Accompa-
nied by Joseph Sisco, who was then Assistant Secretary of State for

The Private Sector — With East River Interlude 439

International Organization Affairs, I first met with the Israeli Prime
Minister Levi Eshkol, on July 15, then conferred the following day with
the Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, and flew by helicopter to the kibbutz
of the Deputy Prime Minister, the late Yigal Allon. I raised with Eshkol
the return of the West Bank to Palestinian control. Knowing I was going
to Jordan for an audience with King Hussein, he authorized me to tell
the King that in return for peace, Israel would be prepared to return
the West Bank with minor modifications to Jordan. But Hussein was not
at the time a free agent. I he Arabs had reacted to their humiliating
defeat in the 1967 war with the so-called Khartoum Declaration, in which
the parties had pledged “no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel,
no recognition of Israel, and maintenance of the rights of Palestinian
people in their nation.” Bound by that agreement and fearing Nasser’s
reprisals, King Hussein was in no position to discuss a separate peace. It
was an unfortunate conjunction, for had the two countries then negoti-
ated the return of the West Bank, the festering Palestinian issue might
by now be largely an historical reference.

On July 17, 1968, Sisco and I flew to Beirut. When our plane arrived,
the American ambassador was waiting for me on the tarmac with his car.
On the roof of the airport, fifty or more Palestinians were noisily dem-
onstrating against United States policy in the Middle East, shouting their
slogans with the same mindless repetition and narcotic rhythm that make
all demonstrations sound alike, whether conducted in Arabic, Farsi or
the bastardized English of this slovenly age. A press conference had been
arranged in the VIP room of the terminal, where I was about to arrive
in the ambassador’s Cadillac. But just as I was entering the car, the
ambassadors chauffeur gave me a fierce shove, and I fell face forward
on the car floor. My instinctive reaction was anger; not until I had pulled
myself together did I realize that the chauffeur had saved me from pos-
sible serious injury. A bottle of soda pop thrown by one of the demon-
strators had missed my head but cut my wrist. Once in the car, the
chauf feur drove out of the airport at a rapid pace. We stayed away long
enough for the Palestinians to disperse, then returned to the press con-
ference. Though I made every effort to conceal my wounded wrist and
conducted the conference with no reference to the incident, one of the
cameramen spotted the blood on my hand. The following day, the
Lebanese newspapers carried large pictures of the press conference with
an arrow pointing to my injury.

do avoid misunderstanding in Washington, I promptly telegraphed
Secretary Rusk, reporting the incident and commenting that I was glad
it had been a 7-Up bottle, since “Pepsi-Cola hits the spot.” The Secre-
tary’s reply was laconic: “You can do things better with Coke.”

During our brief tour in the Middle East, both Sisco and I contracted

44 ° The Private Sector

the endemic regional dysentery, and the thought of going immediately
to the Far East seemed almost unbearable. But since audiences had been
laid on with chiefs of government including Generalissimo Chiang Kai-
shek, meetings had been arranged with foreign ministers, and dinners
and lunches had been planned, cancellation or postponement was out of
the question. So, wretchedly uncomfortable as we were, we endured the
long flight to Tokyo, Seoul, and Taiwan.

The Czech Crisis

In August, my tour as United Nations ambassador was given a brief
importance by the Czech crisis. Like everyone else, I had been exhila-
rated by the spirit of the evanescent “Prague Spring.” But, remembering
Warsaw and Budapest in 1956, I was doubtful that the Soviets could
tolerate the spread of that most subversive political virus, freedom, with-
out prescribing the only medicine the Kremlin doctors understand, force.

I knew that President Johnson had long hoped to finish his term in
office by a climactic visit to Moscow, where he could try to initiate nego-
tiations for strategic arms limitation. Such talks were needed not only
for their promise of progress, but because neutral states were looking to
the two great nuclear powers to agree on limiting nuclear weapons in
return for their adherence to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. At
last, on August 19, the Soviets advised Washington that the President’s
visit could take place during the first ten days of October 1968. The
White House planned to release the news on the morning of August 2 1 .

In the evening of August 20, the Soviet ambassador advised Presi-
dent Johnson of the Kremlin’s decision to intervene in Czechoslovakia.
When I arrived at the White House the next morning — the day of the
intended announcement — I found the President disappointed but in a
mood of sardonic detachment. He, Dean Rusk, and I discussed the broad
implications of the Soviet move and what it would mean to Soviet rela-
tions with our country. Finally, the President said to me rather abruptly,
“George, the matter’s now in your hands; do what you have to do.” Rusk
added, “that means put on your hawk’s beak, go into the Security Coun-
cil, and give the Russians hell.”

That evening, the Council met in emergency session. Our first piece
of business was to get the Czechoslovak crisis inscribed on the agenda.
The USSR and Hungary opposed this procedural move. The Soviet rep-
resentative, Yakov Malik, an old hard-line Stalinist, contended that there
was “no basis” for a Council discussion; the USSR and its allies had moved
their forces into Czechoslovakia “at the request” of the Prague govern-
ment “in view of the threats created by the external and internal reac-
tion” against the country’s “socialist system” and “statehood.” Thus,
Moscow’s intervention had been “in accordance with existing treaty

The Private Sector — With East River Interlude 441

obligations. The Soviet Union would not tolerate “the attempts of the
imperialists to interfere” in the domestic affairs of Czechoslovakia and
“in the relations between all socialist countries.” I affirmed the Council’s
right to take up the crisis, calling the invasion “an affront to all civilized
sensibilities.” The Communists had sought “to impose by force a repres-
sive political system which is plainly obnoxious to the people and lead-
ership of Czechoslovakia,” and the Soviet representative’s explanation
was “a feeble and futile effort at self-justification.”

Once it was clear that the Soviet Union lacked the votes to block
listing the item on the agenda — and could not exercise its veto on a merely
procedural question— Ambassador Malik moved to withdraw his objec-
tion. I challenged this, so as to force the Council to a vote that would
demonstrate the strength on our side. I was upheld by the then Presi-
dent of the Council, a wise and courageous Brazilian representative,
Ambassador Joao Augusto de Araujo Castro.

With the steady and effective assistance of my able Danish colleague,
Ambassador Otto H. Borch, we hammered out a resolution that Den-
mark introduced. It affirmed that the integrity of Czechoslovakia must
be respected and, condemning the armed intervention by the Commu-
nist nations, called on them to withdraw.

In the colloquy that followed, I emphasized the absurdity of the Soviet
position— not hard to do, since it was based on boldfaced lies. When, for
example, Ambassador Yakov Malik repeatedly contended that the Sovi-
ets had been compelled to intervene for reasons of “fraternal solicitude,”
I replied that the fraternal solicitude they were showing toward Czecho-
slovakia was precisely “the kind Cain showed Abel.” I answered Malik’s
charge that only imperialists oppose and deplore” the Soviet govern-
ment s intervention by pointing out that among such so-called imperialists
were Pope Pius VI, the Rumanian and Yugoslavian Presidents, the Pres-
ident of Tanzania, and the leaders of the Communist parties in France
and Italy. Later, when Malik protested to the President of the Council
that “the distinguished United States representative should stop pound-
ing his fist at [him],” I responded that I had not pounded my fist, I had
“not even pounded my shoe.”

On the first day of debate, the Council received a message from the
Czechoslovak foreign minister, Jiri Hajek, demanding that “the illegal
occupation of Czechoslovakia be stopped without delay,” and from the
Presidium of Czechoslovakia’s National Assembly assailing “the occupa-
tion” of the country as a violation of international law, the Warsaw Treaty,
and “the principles of equality between nations.” In the ensuing debate,

I was greatly aided by the British permanent representative, Lord Car-
adon, who spoke with a quiet strength that was perhaps more effective
than my more strident rhetoric.

I he next day the Canadian representative, Ambassador George

44 2 The Private Sector

Ignatieff, introduced a resolution calling on the Secretary-General of
the United Nations to send a representative to Prague “to seek the release
and ensure the safety of the detained Czechoslovak leaders.” Though
that draft resolution was sponsored by seven nations in addition to Can-
ada, Malik rejected it as further evidence of a plot to pave the way for
British and United States “imperialists and counter-revolutionaries to
lure Czechoslovakia away from its Communist allies” — an accusation that
Ambassador Caradon denounced as a “contemptuous, personal insult”
to the Council members. The following evening, on August 24, Foreign
Minister Hajek, who had just flown from Prague, made a dramatic
appearance before the Council, asserting that there was no justification
for the occupation and that the invasion had not been — as the Soviet
representative claimed — carried out “at the request of the Czechoslovak
government.” Malik’s claim that the Soviets were intervening to put down
counter-revolutionary activity was without basis, Hajek insisted, since the
Prague regime had had the situation “firmly in hand and sufficient means
existed to repel any attack upon the foundations of Socialism.”

That evening, Ambassador Malik preempted the Council’s proceed-
ings by a three-hour filibuster in support of a motion that East Ger-
many — not a member of the United Nations — be allowed to participate
in the Council’s deliberations. Though the proposal was defeated by a 9
to 2 vote, Malik succeeded in delaying Council action. India abstained,
as it had in the earlier resolution condemning the invasion. When that
action provoked an anti-government demonstration in New Delhi, Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi explained that India had abstained because the
resolution used the stronger term “condemns” rather than the weaker
“deplores.” That incident inspired me to scribble the following verse,
largely for the edification of my British colleague Lord Caradon, who
sat next to me at the table:

Awesome Power

Each time this august group deplores
It’s like a feral wolf that howls.

I feel a chill in all my pores;

A fearful tremor in my bowels.

My lungs would suffocate with phlegm.

My mind recoil, my pulse race faster,

If the Council ever should condemn,

Since that would mean extreme disaster.

For I can’t think that any nation
Could stand such deep humiliation.

Although the Czechoslovak debate was carried on before the tele-
vision cameras and no doubt served the purpose of exposing Soviet bru-
tality to the world, the diplomats on the spot indulged in rhetoric and

The Private Sector — With East River Interlude 443

play-acting for the consumption of their governments and hometown
newspapers. Malik and I had spent a long night engaged in what the
London Economist referred to as “savaging one another,” but once the
television cameras had been turned off and the meeting adjourned at
three in the morning, he came around the table, pounded me on the
back, and said, “Well, I certainly kept you up late, didn’t I?”

For me the formalistic and artificial atmosphere of the UN proceed-
ing 8 grew increasingly wearying. I could not resist the feeling that I could
be more useful in real life. Bored with the windy speeches that con-
sumed most of the Security Council’s proceedings, I kept myself awake
by writing additional frivolous verse, which I would then toss over to
Lord Caradon. Sometimes a verse would contain such scandalous refer-
ences to some of our colleagues that Caradon would hastily put it face
downward under a pile of papers for fear he might be seen reading it.
One of my jingles inspired by Malik, the Soviet ambassador, a fat,
humorless apparatchik, was this:

Reflections on Soviet Ambassador Malik

DURING THE CZECHOSLOVAKIAN CRISIS

How could one ever tell Moloch from Malik,

Since both were choleric and neither was Gallic,

Each had a shape one could call parabolic,

Neither engaged in pursuits apostolic;

So their resemblance seemed more than symbolic.

They differed in this: That, while both melancholic.

They chose disparate methods to frisk and to frolic.

Malik made speeches with words vitriolic,

While Moloch ate children to settle his colic.

Diplomats, by training if not natural selection, develop certain defen-
sive skills. If one is required to spend long hours in international meet-
ings, he must learn to sleep with his eyes open, an exercise requiring a
posture of meditation with the hand just shading the eyes. Though
indispensable, that device can sometimes be hazardous, as was demon-
strated one day during an interminable session on a Middle East outrage
committed by the Arabs against the Israelis or vice versa. One of my
friends on the Security Council, who shall be nameless, had received
instructions from his government to abstain on the particular resolution.
Just prior to the Council vote, the representative of a Middle-Eastern
country who never spoke for less than two hours and never said any-
thing useful, asked permission to address the Council; it was routinely
granted. My friend quite sensibly told the young man sitting behind him
to wake him when it was time to vote.

As the Middle-Eastern orator was about to conclude his first hour of
impassioned irrelevance, my French colleague decided that he would try

444

The Private Sector

to persuade my friend to support the resolution rather than merely
abstain. Walking around the table, he put his arm on my sleeping col-
league’s shoulder; whereupon my friend raised his hand and, in a loud,
clear, voice announced with dramatic emphasis, “Mr. President, my
country abstains.’’ It was a memorable moment — in some ways, perhaps,
the Security Council’s finest hour.

Resignation from the United Nations

The summer of 1968 was a nightmare season for America. The
country was suffering a fever of hysteria and revulsion induced by the
Vietnam War; many colleges and universities had shamefully capitu-
lated to Yahoo outrage without even the feeblest gesture of institutional
self-defense. Politics were in total upheaval. I had watched the proceed-
ings of the Democratic convention in Chicago and the ghastly mess that
resulted; now, as the campaign began, I saw my poor friend Vice-Presi-
dent Humphrey trying futilely to make himself heard against the mind-
less yammering of enraged hell-raisers. I was revolted by the negation
of civility and rationality and outraged that Nixon not only seemed
immune from the attacks of exhibitionist hysterics, but was gaining in
the polls to the point where in early September he was running seven-
teen points ahead.

The prospect that Nixon might be President of the United States
seemed derisive. He was, I thought — and he has since shown himself to
be — intellectually corrupt. So, on an official visit to Europe in August, I
decided to resign from the United Nations and do what I could to help
Humphrey. I did not think for a moment he could win, but at least we
might deny Nixon an overwhelming victory. I called Lyndon Johnson at
his Texas ranch expecting serious opposition. To deflect his counterat-
tack, I began the conversation by saying, “Mr. President, always before
when I’ve taken a step I’ve sought your permission, but this time I’m not
asking you but advising you that I’ve made a decision as a matter of
conscience.” When I had finished my speech, the President responded
in a sympathetic way but asked for two or three days to find a successor
for me at the United Nations; otherwise, with such a rapid turnover, his
Administration “would look jerky.” I then called Hubert Humphrey to
tell him that I was joining him and agreed to meet him in Seattle.

The Humphrey Campaign

I told the Vice-President that he must do something dramatic to halt
Nixon’s momentum. Most urgent was for him to stake out an indepen-
dent position on Vietnam so as to deflect some of the anti-Johnson venom.
At the same time, I planned to attack Nixon so outrageously as to force

The Private Sector — With East River Interlude

445

people to stop and think. On the day I resigned my UN job, I gave a
conference in the State Department Press Room in which I announced
that I was compelled by conscience to act, because Nixon “lamentably
lacks” the qualities necessary for Presidential leadership. I expressed
optimism that there would be “a political solution to the Vietnamese War
fairly early in the term of the next President — if he is President Hum-
phrey. But, I said, “if he is Mr. Nixon, I have no idea what he would
do. ... I don’t think he has any kind of settled principles.” I never spoke
a truer word.

Three days later on September 29, on the CBS program “Face the
Nation, I mentioned Nixon’s “preposterous” choice of Governor Spiro
Agnew for a running mate as an example of “cynicism and irresponsi-
bility.” I described Agnew as “a fourth-rate political hack” and suggested
that the “tricky Dick” label attached to Nixon in the past might well have
had some validity. As I had hoped, my comments were widely noted,
and I like to think they may have helped to halt Nixon’s increasing
advantage at the polls. I he Reverend Billy Graham, however, publicly
rebuked me for questioning Nixon’s integrity; he had, so he said, played
golf with Nixon on many occasions and had never seen him cheat.

Humphrey on Vietnam

I thought it essential to focus attention on the inadequacies of the
Republican candidates, but the campaign could not be merely negative;
we needed to establish Humphrey as having an independent Vietnam
position. Although Hubert Humphrey and I had frequently discussed
Vietnam and I knew that his views resembled mine, he had, as Vice-
President, felt compelled to support the President’s policies, and he could
never do anything half-heartedly.

I had innocently expected that Lyndon Johnson, having hated his
own experience as Vice-President, would try to make Humphrey’s ordeal
more pleasant and productive, but he seemed perversely determined to
make Humphrey’s life as miserable as his had been. The poor Vice-Pres-
ident was being crushed to death by antagonistic vanities, jealousies, and
political forces. He clearly did not wish to alienate the President, but he
was fiercely harrassed by the companions he had once led on the liberal
barricades. Now, instead of attacking Nixon, they were churlishly spend-
ing their talent for invective on their old comrade, while writing quirkish
dithyrambs to the higher morality of not voting. Many in their silent
hearts must later have repented their contribution to Nixon’s victory. At
least I hope so; I shall burn no candles for them.

My first task was to try to restate Humphrey’s position on the peace
negotiations in terms sufficiently distinguishable from Johnson’s to sat-
isfy the more reasonable antiwar faction, without, at the same time, driv-

446 The Private Sector

ing the President into outright opposition. I draf ted some foggy language
for a speech the Vice-President planned to make at Salt Lake City, only
to find that members of his campaign staff, friends, and volunteers had
also produced four or five additional drafts, each with its fervent pro-
ponents. Following the usual untidy pattern that prevails in campaign
circles, nuances of language and approach were being fiercely debated.
To avoid attack from Lyndon Johnson— who was at the time a far more
formidable opponent than Nixon — I asked a colleague from Lehman
Brothers, Harry Fitzgibbons, to fly to Paris, talk with Harriman and Vance
and obtain their assurance that the key passage I had written would not
prejudice the current Vietnam negotiations and that if Humphrey were
attacked for making the speech, they would express that assurance pub-
licly.

The problem was to distinguish Humphrey s position from that of
Johnson by inventing a sufficiently fuzzy shibboleth. I he area for
maneuver was narrow. Instead of requiring enemy agreement before
we stopped the bombing — which had been the Johnson position — we
would have Humphrey say that he would “stop the bombing of North
Vietnam as an acceptable risk for peace,” then see what response might
develop, “reserving the right to resume bombing if no such response was
clear.”

All this sounded like pettifogging, and it was; yet in a political cam-
paign, code words and phrases are more significant than logic or sub-
stance. No one expects either the rational or relevant at the end of a
Presidential race. The press, as I saw it, confused the respective roles of
the players; on their score cards Humphrey was running against John-
son, while Nixon was allowed to sit sanctimoniously on the sidelines,
immune from the embarrassment of searching questions. No one asked
Humphrey how his views on the war differed from those of Nixon; the
thrust of every inquiry was, How did Humphrey’s differ from Lyndon
Johnson’s? That point had to be clarified in the Salt Lake City speech.

The critical language I had drafted was argued and refined and
redrafted principally by men who knew little about the war but had a
self-proclaimed infallibility regarding public opinion. At the end, I grew
impatient and, finally, in the middle of the night, Larry O’Brien, Hum-
phrey’s campaign manager (a man with both experience and common
sense) said quietly to me, “You make the final decision. I replied, then
we’ll go ahead the way it’s now written.”

Our schedule called for the Vice-President to tape the speech at a
studio in the afternoon, then immediately call the President. Once Hum-
phrey had completed talking with Johnson, I was then to call him to
explain the Vice-President’s proposed statement and “get him down off
the ceiling.”

I waited in the hotel. Toward the the middle of the afternoon, some-
one called from the studio to say that the Vice-President was dissatisfied

The Private Sector — With East River Interlude 44 7

with his first taping of his speech and wished to retape it. Since he did
not have time to call the President would I please do so? I should read
Johnson the critical language of the speech and try to persuade him not
to react in a destructive way. That was not a chore I welcomed, but I put
through the call only to be told by the White House operator that the
President was talking with Mr. Nixon. She would ring me as soon as the
President was finished. A half-hour later she called.

I read the language to President Johnson and explained the Vice-
President’s intention. He listened in silence, then replied, “Well, George,
nobody’s better than you at explaining things to the press and I know
you 11 be able to persuade them that this doesn’t mark any change in the
Vice-President’s position from the line we’ve all been following.”

Though his reaction was not unexpected I could not leave it at that.
“I m sorry, Mr. President,” I said, “but that’s not quite the name of the
game.” I expected an angry riposte but he seemed in a relaxed mood.
“Well, George, I know you’ll do the best you can.”

Appraisal of Humphrey

1 found the whole campaign enormously depressing. Humphrey, a
generous and honest man, was assailed whenever he tried to speak by
the obscene gibbering and caterwauling of moronic youths who made
all public discourse impossible. “I can stand it for myself,” Humphrey
told me, but I can t tell you how I boil inside when a bunch of young
slobs spew out their obscenities when Muriel’s with me.” The noxious
effects of Vietnam were metastasizing — spreading through the whole
fiber of our society and corrupting our institutions. My fervent wish for
a Humphrey Administration stemmed primarily from my belief that he
would bring the ugly war to an end. I doubted Nixon would have the
sense or the character to do so — and time tragically confirmed that
appraisal when he dragged it on for four more years.

I had known Hubert Humphrey a long while, and we had talked on
many occasions, but I did not regard him as a close friend. He was a man
of extraordinary decency — quite the most generous and compassionate
man in politics. I hough I had no doubt he was infinitely preferable to
Nixon, I doubted he would be a distinguished President. Humphrey
was, in my observation, intellectually quick, hard-working, and conscien-
tious, but he lacked the incisiveness and ruthlessness needed of a Presi-
dent. He was excessively enthusiastic, too easily carried away; he could
never avoid hyperbole and overstatement. His speeches were efferves-
cent but endless, and I remember two comments current at the time.
One was an observation that “Hubert never had an unexpressed
thought.” 1 he other was a remark no doubt apocryphally attributed to
his wife Muriel, “Just remember, Hubert, that a speech to be immortal
doesn’t have to be eternal.”

448 The Private Sector

Had Humphrey been more disciplined and self-seeking he could,
during his term as Vice-President, have satisfied Johnson’s wish for
unquestioning support of his Vietnam position without going totally
overboard in a way that made him vulnerable to his fickle liberal col-
leagues. But he was too exuberant for that, and they crucified him.

Later, when dying of cancer, he returned gallantly to Washington for
a farewell speech, and the Senate rang with encomia. I could not help
but recall Matthew Arnold’s words on growing old:

It is — last stage of all —

When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,

To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.

Escape to Europe

Because the country was in such a black-minded mood, I was con-
vinced Humphrey would not win. I had endured losing campaigns before
and had no taste for another sour “victory” celebration. So, to fill our
minds with fresh thoughts and a brighter landscape, Ruth and I booked
passage on the France , sailing the morning after the election. We were
escaping from an American scene I thought of as the Age of Slobbism —
students befouling (“trashing,” as they vacuously called it) their own
intellectual nests, while a few muddle-headed instructors applauded the
mishandling of deans.

We had always found sea voyages diverting, and this was no excep-
tion. On our next-to-last night, a gale force wind rolled the ship to star-
board for what seemed like minutes, then just as sluggishly, she righted
herself and resumed course — a ship filled with broken bones and smashed
furniture.

At breakfast in a shattered dining saloon I said to Arthur Sulzberger,
the publisher of the New York Times , “My God, Punch, think what this
means. Nixon’s been elected for only three days and already we’ve been
on the verge of shipwreck!”

It was a prophetic comment.

19 . From Nixon to Ford to Carter

Six weeks of unplanned wandering in France and Spain
immediately after the 1968 election were a comforting distraction from
the confusions of an unsatisfying year. Old structures — castles, cha-

From Nixon to Ford to Carter 449

teaus, and cathedrals — as well as the Grecos and Goyas at the Prado,
restored a needed sense of continuity and perspective. Ruth and I
spent Christmas with our sons in Florida, and I delayed my return to
Lehman Brothers until January. I needed time to think and I was
sure some of my elderly, outraged Republican partners needed a cool-
ing off period.

To the presiding deities on Wall Street I was a pariah. I was not
asked to rejoin the boards of directors of two major companies, Stan-
dard Oil of California and the Singer Corporation, on which I had sat
before my tour at the United Nations, or to resume my membership on
the International Advisory Board of the Upjohn Company. Shaking his
head in sad bewilderment, the chairman of one of the companies
explained that neither he nor his friends could understand why I had
attacked Nixon with such “excessiveness. ” It had evoked sharp disap-
proval from some of the company’s major shareholders. I replied that,
though I regretted any awkwardness my activities may have caused him,
I could not agree that I had shown excessiveness except in the restraint
I had displayed. He smiled wanly, and we parted on good terms.

Twice during my days as a lawyer I had had to rebuild a professional
practice after extended periods of political absence and now, as an
investment banker, I once more faced that prospect. It was not a task I
welcomed but it provided the occasion for travel as well as a chance to
regain my financial equilibrium. I had always regarded the human com-
edy as absorbing theater and, freed from responsibility for helping to
conduct large affairs, I was no longer inhibited in exposing my preju-
dices as a self-appointed critic of a muddled world. So for the next few
years, I published articles in such periodicals as the New York Times, the
Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and Foreign
Affairs, and for two and a half years wrote a foreign affairs column for
Newsweek. 1

I enjoyed living in New York, and I found relief in an atmosphere
not soggy with politics. Each of our two sons, John and Douglas, was
beginning to make his own individual mark, and Ruth and I enjoyed the
variety of friendships only a metropolitan city can provide. Defined in
purely personal terms, life was quite agreeable — particularly after 1973
when Peter G. Peterson took over the leadership of Lehman Brothers.
A brilliant man of business with broad horizons and a relentlessly ana-
lytical mind, he not only provided a congenial professional environment
but became an extremely warm and good friend. To him, Lewis Glucks-
man, and my other partners I owe a debt of gratitude for their indul-
gence of the time I spent on my vagrant interests and their tolerance of
the unpopular views I frequently expressed in speeches or writing.

Though I had no ambition to become an old curmudgeon I did not
like much of what I saw occurring in the world — or even in my own

450 The Private Sector

country. The mindless dragging on of the Vietnam War was destroying
America’s civility and encouraging a degradation of life — drugs, campus
disorders, hippies, hysteria, pernicious egocentrism, and pervasive and
ugly disarray.

Life under Nixon

Though I intensely disliked Nixon, I was still prepared to help him
with policies on which we agreed. On May 13, 1971, when Senate Major-
ity Leader Mike Mansfield seemed on the verge of securing Senate pas-
sage of legislation to withdraw American forces from Europe, Nixon
called in the “elder statesmen.” After a meeting that was more a pep talk
than a briefing, I told him I would devote the following week to active
lobbying against the Mansfield bill. During part of the time I worked out
of the Vice-President’s office near the Senate Chamber, a bizarre envi-
ronment for a Democrat in a Republican Administration. Since I had
both conviction and logic on my side, I found most Senators willing to
listen. As a result, I was able to muster a number of votes against troop
withdrawal.

When I returned to New York on May 19, 1971, the day of the vote,
President Nixon graciously telephoned to thank me. His legislative
assistants, he said, had told him that, had I not lobbied so effectively, the
cause could well have been lost. Taking advantage of the opportunity, I
described the lamentable state of his relations with the Senate and strongly
urged that he give the matter personal attention. Though our little band
of the superannuated had this time been of help, he could not use us
effectively again. “A souffle, ” I said, “cannot be made to rise twice.” He
would have to talk personally with the leaders of both houses, and I
suggested that he ask Henry Kissinger to hold a series of small break-
fasts. “Oh,” he replied, “let me tell you, just within the family” — then,
pausing awkwardly as he realized the import of his words — “I mean the
international family, I can’t use Henry with people on the Hill without
getting Bill Rogers’s nose out of joint.”

“Then,” I answered, “ask Bill to invite some Senators and Congress-
men down in very small groups — otherwise, it won’t mean anything.”

That was my only direct contact with Nixon during his Presidency.
Having studied his behavior beginning with his earliest days in Califor-
nia politics, I was not surprised by the sordid disclosures of Watergate.
During the 1968 campaign, I had argued that something of the kind was
inevitable and I was even more explicit on February 8, 1973 — a little
more than a fortnight after Nixon’s second inauguration — when 1 spoke
at the St. Stephens Club in London to a Conservative party ginger soci-
ety known as the Bow Group. The audience, consisting of young mem-
bers of parliament and party supporters, seemed intensely interested in

From Nixon to Ford to Carter

45 *

American politics, and since it was a closed meeting, I spoke with candor.
During the question period following my remarks, someone asked, “How
do you appraise the future course of Nixon’s new Administration now
that he has just achieved a second term?” I had not anticipated the ques-
tion but answered impulsively; ‘‘His Administration will destroy itself by
its own corruption within a few months. The chemistry is unavoidable:
corruption mixed with arrogance leads to carelessness, carelessness to
exposure, and exposure to disaster.”

As Watergate began to reveal itself in all its squalor in the weeks that
followed, I received two or three letters from young members of parlia-
ment who had been present at the meeting, asking what I knew that
others did not know. “I was relying,” I replied, “not on knowledge but
instinct.”

Not only was I on the outside during the Nixon period but my status
did not change with the advent of President Ford. Though I had known
and liked Gerald Ford during his days in Congress I now saw him only
on diplomatic occasions. That included one memorable dinner for Pres-
ident Sadat when Ford’s mind wandered or his tongue slipped and he
toasted the people of Israel when he meant Egypt. I could not resist a
silent guffaw, yet I felt a warm feeling for him, since once, in a conver-
sation with the Shah, I had heard myself refer to Algeria instead of Iran.

The Carter Incumbency

After Jimmy Carter was elected, some of my old friends drifted back
to Washington, but I felt little rapport with the new President. Prior to
the 1976 campaign, I had been only vaguely aware of Carter, though
after I left the government. Dean Rusk had once asked me to prepare
some material for a Democratic party briefing book being put together
by a young Governor of Georgia. Of all the potential candidates, I was
most attracted to Edmund Muskie, but I was inhibited by my impulsive
promise to Hubert Humphrey in 1968 that if he ran again, I would
support him. I do not recall my first meeting with Carter, which — so I
was told later — occurred on December 8, 1974, when I made a speech
at one of the two meetings of the Trilateral Commission I ever attended.
Jimmy Carter was in the audience; and we apparently conversed briefly
afterwards. Then in October 1975, Lewis Glucksman, one of my part-
ners, brought Carter to breakfast at Lehman Brothers.

I found the Governor eager to talk but not much interested in listen-
ing. He seemed totally enthralled by his campaign planning, describing
in great detail the precise steps by which he intended to become Presi-
dent. I could scarcely believe he felt as self-assured as he seemed, for he
appeared to have no doubt whatever that he would succeed in his quest.
Yet while he was voluble about his campaign plans, he scarcely men-

4^2 The Private Sector

tioned policies or what he hoped to do when he became President. At
the conclusion of our breakfast, he suggested that if I had any foreign
policy ideas for his campaign I should let him know, but I did not then
take him seriously as a candidate. He was, as I saw him, an attractive
young Southern politician with few apparent qualifications for the Pres-
idency except ambition. He would, I thought, almost certainly be elimi-
nated early in the Democratic primary race in which seventeen or
eighteen candidates were then savagely competing.

I was, therefore, quite unprepared for a telephone call I received in
January from the newspaper columnist Rowland Evans, who asked me
if I knew Jimmy Carter well.

“No,” I replied. “I only met him once at breakfast last October.”

“You haven’t been in touch with him since?”

“No,” I replied. “Not a word.”

“That’s funny,” Evans replied. “He’s just announced that you’re one
of his principal foreign policy advisers.”

My first reaction was annoyance, since I feared Carter’s statement
might lead Humphrey to think I had betrayed him, but as I thought
about it later, 1 found the incident amusing. It did not, however, con-
tribute to Carter’s affection for me — particularly since Evans wrote a
needling column pointing out the discrepancy in our statements. No
doubt it was even more galling to Carter when Evans’s partner ques-
tioned him about it on a national television show. Carter replied that he
had been guilty of “an inadvertence”; he had thought his staff was in
close touch with me.

After he was nominated, his staff did approach me once or twice; I
was given a speech to vet and suggested large cuts in the text, which
were almost all rejected. Later, he was gracious enough to offer me a
choice of major diplomatic assignments, which I quietly declined. I had,
I told him, been away from home too much of my life; my wife and I
had just bought a house in Princeton; and I did not want, at this point,
to live abroad. I refrained from saying what I really felt — that jet planes
and telephones and the bad habits of Presidents, National Security
Assistants and Secretaries of State had now largely restricted ambassa-
dors to ritual and public relations. I did not wish to end my days as an
innkeeper for itinerant Congressmen.

Economic Assignment

Still I was sometimes asked to undertake an occasional special chore.
In 1978, at the instigation of my old friend Secretary of the Treasury
W. Michael Blumenthal, I was invited to join some able economists —
Robert V. Roosa, Lawrence R. Klein, the late Arthur M. Okun, and Wil-
liam G. Bowen, the president of Princeton University — to review our

From Nixon to Ford to Carter 433

major economic problems, discuss our comments and proposals with the
President, and prepare a report.

Our group first met in Washington with the Secretary of the Treas-
ury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board (then William G.
Miller) on September 8, 1978. Later, we had a long session with the
President that began toward the middle of the afternoon and lasted until
well after dinner. With the help of Bob Roosa, I had prepared a presen-
tation showing separately, in columnar form, the nature of the domestic
benefits expected from each measure we might take, the domestic trade-
offs it would require, its international benefits, and its international trade-
offs. As I had expected, the President, with his engineer’s background,
thought the presentation well-designed but he could not, he said, accept
any of the trade-offs; he had been elected to help the poor, and those
trade-offs would help the rich. The same moralistic attitude was exhib-
ited by Mrs. Carter, who said to me later, when we were having drinks
on the balcony, “Don’t you think Jimmy is going to have to veto the tax
bill? He doesn’t feel right inside about it.’’ I tried to explain, as I had to
the President earlier in the afternoon, that the essence of democratic
government was compromise and that the President would have to do
many things with which he might not feel totally comfortable. Only by
such compromises could he hope to accomplish his principal objectives.

Obviously these are brief impressions, quite inadequate on which to
base a solid judgment, yet it seems clear from many bits and pieces of
evidence that the intrusion of an inflexible morality quite often dimin-
ished Carter’s effectiveness, since he could not reconcile it with the
political process. In addition, I thought I detected one other aspect of
President Carter’s approach to major problems that got in the way of
serious strategic thinking. When one gave him a brief or a memoran-
dum, he would read it quickly with obvious understanding and he was
impressively proficient at mastering quantitative and statistical materials.
Yet, once we began to deal more profoundly with a foreign policy prob-
lem, he seemed to lack a well-developed matrix into which ideas could
be fitted. In other words, he tended to see problems in a discrete form
far too straitened to encompass the large framework that gave them
meaning.

Imperial Megalomania

That impression was confirmed when, just as the Shah’s dynasty was
collapsing, the President asked me once again for advice. I had known
the Shah since my days in the State Department, when I used to partici-
pate in negotiations with him. Those negotiations usually concerned, first,
his importunate demand for enhanced oil sales to improve his foreign
exchange revenues, and, second, his request that we sell him more and

454 The Private Sector

more sophisticated weapons. While we discussed the first issue with the
major oil companies (which were reluctant to increase these liftings from
Iran since that would incite similar pressure from Saudi Arabia), we held
firm on the Shah’s second demand. We did not wish to begin an arms
race among the Middle Eastern countries nor did we think it useful for
the Shah to waste resources on sophisticated weapons his meagerly
trained forces could not use effectively. When he threatened to turn to
the Soviet Union for help, we told him to go ahead; in fact, he did buy
a certain amount of military hardware from France and Great Britain.
In any event, we held our position so firmly that during the entire period
of nineteen years from his return to power in 1953 to 1972, his total
arms purchases from the United States amounted to only $1.2 billion. 2

But all that changed in May 1972 when President Nixon and Mr.
Kissinger flew from Moscow to Teheran for a meeting with the Shah.
The British had announced four years earlier that they would withdraw
their military presence from east of Suez, and they had, toward the end
of 1971, substantially completed that withdrawal, leaving a power vac-
uum in the Persian Gulf. Had we followed our established practice,
America would have filled that vacuum, as we had done, for example,
when the British withdrew from Greece and Turkey. But, applying his
so-called Nixon Doctrine, the President decided to entrust the security
of the Gulf to the Shah, who would act as the protector for all Western
interests. That, of course, was music to the Shah’s ears, since it gave him
recognition as the dominant power in the area; but, he stipulated, he
would undertake the assignment only on certain conditions, of which
two were particularly important.

The first was that the United States assist the Kurds in their revolt
against Iraq in order to keep the Iraqis off balance. We agreed and later
provided a substantial amount of money to Mustafa al-Barzani, the Kur-
dish leader, and sent military advisers to help the Kurdish forces.

The second condition was that we give the Iranian government
unrestricted access to our most sophisticated military equipment. That
was also agreed and, on returning to the United States, Kissinger, in the
name of the President, directed the Secretaries of State and Defense to
sell the Shah whatever he wanted, including such items as F-14 and F-
15 aircraft (then still in development) and laser-guided bombs that were
just being introduced to American units in Vietnam. Then, in language
that drastically broke with past American practice, Kissinger directed
that, regardless of the views of our government departments, they should
sell the Iranian government whatever it desired; the Shah, in other words,
should have the ultimate power to decide what military equipment he
would acquire.

I think it clear that in anointing the Shah as the guardian of Western
interests in the whole Gulf area, Nixon inadvertently encouraged the

From Nixon to Ford to Carter 45 5

megalomania that ultimately contributed to the Shah’s downfall. Permit-
ting him free access to the whole range of advanced items in our military
arsenal was like giving the keys of the world’s largest liquor store to a
confirmed alcoholic. As compared to the $1.2 billion of arms and equip-
ment we had let him buy during the preceding nineteen years, he placed
orders during the next seven years following the Nixon visit for $19.5
billion of our military hardware. With America recognizing him as the
official guardian of the Persian Gulf, with vast amounts of imposing
weapons beginning to arrive and with oil revenues beginning to mount
after the price increases in 1974, the Shah felt commissioned by Allah to
transform Iran into what he now boasted would become the fifth most
powerful nation in the world. Overnight he sought to build a backward,
religious country into a modern — though corrupt — industrial state,
relying almost exclusively on Western technicians and technology. In
trying to fulfill his Messianic mission, he isolated himself from his people
and lost his sense of proportion, thus encouraging the destructive forces
that proved his undoing.

Fall of the Shah

Ever since the latter 1960s, I had visited Iran almost every year and
had made a number of close Iranian friends. I had also talked with the
Shah periodically, either in 1 eheran or in Zurich, where he went every
January for medical attention in preparation for his annual skiing vaca-
tion. During the middle 1970s, I gained the impression from my Iranian
friends that the Shah’s regime was becoming increasingly repressive and
the secret police (the SAVAK), more brutal and unrestrained. During
late evening parties in Teheran with brilliant young writers, journalists,
and professional men, I listened to freely expressed predictions of chaos
and disorder when and if something happened to the Shah, and my
friends frankly recognized that the Shah’s regime might some day be
brought down. 1 he Shah had lost touch with his nation’s intellectual
elite — able and Western-educated Iranians who should have formed the
hard core of his support.

Yet I did not gain a sense of imminent disaster until toward the end
of the decade of the seventies, when I found the atmosphere increas-
ingly tense. I had not then fully understood the extent to which the Shah
had — often through well-intended actions — disaffected almost every
sector of the population. He was, as I appraised him, by no means an
evil man; he had an honorable ambition for his country and worked
tirelessly to fulfill it. But that ambition — stimulated by America’s short-
sighted encouragement — grew more and more excessive and unrealistic.
In trying to carry out his grandiose plans, he alienated first one group
and then another. It was not merely, as some have simplistically sug-

456 The Private Sector

gesteci, that he pushed modernization (which really meant Westerniza-
tion) beyond the capabilities of the nation’s antiquated political
structure — that was only part of the problem; much more important was
his lack of sensitivity to his people’s needs, hopes, and aspirations, which
were by no means identical with his. His weakness, selfishness, and
indulgence led him to condone widespread corruption among his family
and hangers-on; their obscene display of wealth and the general tone of
his regime encouraged brutal abuses and repression, of which he could
not have been unaware. Meanwhile, he made himself useful to a succes-
sion of United States governments — performing such unpopular chores,
at our request, as selling oil to Israel. It was no wonder that American
officials believed — because they found it convenient to believe — that his
regime was in no danger, that it was, in the language of President Car-
ter’s New Year’s toast in December 1977 — a year before the Shah’s
downfall — “an island of stability.” That characterization was, the Presi-
dent told the Shah, a “great tribute to the respect, admiration and love
of your people for you.” 3

In retrospect, it seems clear that the revolution which was building
up all through the year 1978 was not an Islamic revolt so much as a
revolution of a thousand discontents, for which Islam merely provided
the flag of respectability. Beginning in January 1978, I carefully fol-
lowed accounts of spreading disaffection in the mosques and the dem-
onstrations every forty days to mourn the death of mullahs killed by the
Shah’s police — demonstrations that resulted in further killings and, forty
days later, more widespread mourning until the streets were filled with
insensate mobs. But I had still not formed a clear view as to the imme-
diacy of catastrophe until, on August 20, a fire in an Abadan movie thea-
ter killed 430 people. Since it was generally assumed to have been set by
Moslem extremists opposed to the Shah’s liberalization policies, it added
such an impetus to the rising wave of disorder as to persuade my closest
Iranian friend to move his family out of the country with no plan to
return. That was a radical step for a man with so much to lose; not only
was he a distinguished member of the Teheran bar, but exceptionally
sophisticated in political matters and not given to intemperate or precip-
itate action. From then on, watching carefully for signs of increasing
disintegration, I reluctantly concluded that the Shah was on the way to
a great fall and that, like Humpty-Dumpty, his regime could not be put
together again.

I outlined that probability and its implications for America in two or
three speeches to small informal gatherings in New York during Sep-
tember and October 1978, and mentioned it to some of my friends in
the Carter Administration— including Secretary of the Treasury Blu-
menthal. In November, when Secretary Blumenthal visited Iran and
could appraise the situation at first hand, he was appalled by what he
found — particularly the Shah’s own confused and indecisive state of mind.

From Nixon to Ford to Carter 45 7

On returning to Washington he proposed to President Carter that I be
asked to make an objective appraisal of the situation, to which the Pres-
ident agreed.

By then it was the eleventh hour. I was not summoned to Washing-
ton until November 30, 1978. I was given an office with the staff of the
National Security Council and assigned an excellent colleague and coun-
sellor, Captain Gary Sick of the United States Navy, an expert on the
Persian Gulf then assigned to the Security Council staff. Though some
had assumed that I would begin my assignment by visiting Iran, I
promptly disabused them of that assumption. I had learned from our
Vietnam experience how dangerous it can be when travel is substituted
for thought. I could learn far more by mining the resources of Washing-
ton than by talking with a few friends and officials in Iran, while my
sudden appearance in Teheran would merely provide new documenta-
tion for those attacking the Shah as subservient to America.

Muddle at the Top

In spite of Captain Sick’s friendliness, insight, patience, and excellent
guidance, I felt depressed by the conditions I now found — particularly
the distorted role of the National Security Council (the NSC). The Coun-
cil had been created during the Truman Administration in 1947 as a
central mechanism to collate the views of the several departments and
agencies that claimed an interest in a particular foreign policy question
and to provide machinery through which the interested parties could
develop coherent positions. McGeorge Bundy, as National Security
Assistant during my tenure in the State Department, was the first to give
substantive content to the role but he had at all times recognized the
Secretary of State’s primacy in foreign policy matters and had assidu-
ously protected the State Department when others tried to make an end
run to the President. During his years in the White House, Henry Kis-
singer had greatly expanded the NSC staff to create a miniature foreign
office and had misused his role as national security adviser to try to
exclude the Department from policy formulation and to cut down the
Secretary of State so as to aggrandize his own power position; then, once
having become Secretary, Kissinger had reduced the NSC to its earlier
dimensions and mandate. Now once again, I found President Carter’s
National Security Assistant, Zbigniew Brzezinski, trying to emulate Kis-
singer’s rise to prominence by inflating and manipulating the NSC. He
was operating in a free-wheeling manner, calling in foreign ambassa-
dors, telephoning or sending telegrams to foreign dignitaries outside
State Department channels, and even hiring a press adviser so he could
compete with the Secretary of State as the enunciator of United States
foreign policy.

That Brzezinski had the President’s ear and wielded significant influ-

458 The Private Sector

ence seemed clear enough. He possessed the same facility as Walt Ros-
tow for inventing abstractions that sounded deceptively global and
profound — at least to Presidents not inoculated by early exposure to
the practice. As Scotty Reston had said of another academic diplomat,
he “delighted in flinging continents about.” My father had once described
that facility as “a flair for making little fishes talk like whales.”

A national security adviser’s influence does not depend merely on
his talents as a courtier; he has the advantage of briefing the President
every morning and can thus exploit the time-tested bureaucratic princi-
ple that “nothing propinks like propinquity.” He is almost constantly
available while, in these days of jet diplomacy, Secretaries of State tend
to travel compulsively. Thus during my brief Iranian assignment, both
Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and the Assistant Secretary of State for
Near Eastern Affairs, Alfred L. Atherton, Jr., were away on a negotiat-
ing trip in the Middle East. Brzezinski was systematically excluding the
State Department from the shaping or conduct of our Iranian policy. To
assure the Department’s insulation, he admonished me, immediately on
my arrival, that I should not talk with the State Department’s Iranian
desk officer, because he “leaked” — an instruction I, of course, immedi-
ately disregarded.

Not only was the State Department being excluded from the man-
agement of our policies toward Iran, I soon found that our ambassador
in Teheran, a seasoned career officer, William H. Sullivan, was being
similarly bypassed. Brzezinski was forming his view of the situation, in
part at least, by telephone conversations with the Iranian ambassador to
the United States, Ardeshir Zahedi, who had gone back to Teheran at
the request of the White House. Since, as the Shah’s former son-in-law,
Zahedi’s power and position depended entirely on keeping the Shah on
his throne, his advice to the United States was dangerously slanted.

During the next few days, I read the telegraphic traffic between
Washington and our Teheran embassy and the reports prepared by the
various United States intelligence agencies, interviewed everyone in gov-
ernment who might have insight into the situation, and talked with a
number of outside experts from the universities. Then on December 12,
1979, I prepared a report for the President.

Report for the President

The Shah’s regime, I wrote, “is on the verge of collapse.” That “col-
lapse is far more significant than a localized foreign policy crisis with
exceptionally high stakes; it challenges the basic validity of the Nixon
Doctrine.” We had no one but ourselves to blame for the situation in
which we were now confronted, for

From Nixon to Ford to Carter 459

we made the Shah what he has become. We nurtured his love for grandiose
geopolitical schemes and we supplied him the hardware to indulge his fantasies.
Once we had anointed him as protector of our interests in the Persian Gulf, we
became dependent on him. Now that his regime is coming apart under the pres-
sure of imported modernization, we have so committed ourselves as to have no
ready alternative.

Meanwhile, we must deal with the realities of the Shah’s precarious power
position and help him face it. We must make clear that, in our view, his only
chance to save his dynasty (if indeed that is still possible) and retain our support
is for him to transfer his power to a government responsive to the people. Only
il he takes that action can Iran hope to avoid continued disaffection followed by
a cumulative economic paralysis.

So long as we continued to express our unqualified support for the
Shah, he would, I wrote, try to hang on to his full power and avoid the
hard decisions and . . . difficult actions required even for his own sur-
vival.” He had so far given no indication that he might abdicate, yet he
could not be sure of his army’s loyalty were it used against the people.
Though, I wrote, “the older hard-line officers in the top military com-
mand are likely to remain loyal to the Shah and if necessary to use brutal
force to keep him in power,” there is “growing discontent particularly
among the junior officers.” The worst thing that could happen would be
for the Shah to try to save himself by turning his army against the people
and having it disintegrate. If his troops refused to fire on their own
fathers and brothers, that would mean mutiny and civil war and the
Soviets could well be the largest gainer.

I he problem, as I diagnosed it, was to provide a mechanism by which
the Shah might transfer his powers to a democratic government that
would not be automatically discredited as being his own creature. To
that end I proposed that he appoint a Council of Notables, consisting of
perhaps fifty individuals carefully chosen to represent all sectors of the
opposition except the extreme left. (With the help of the State Depart-
ment and CIA, we even prepared dossiers of more than fifty possible
candidates for the Council.) The Council of Notables, as I conceived it,
would not in itself be a government; instead, it would have the mandate
to create a government that no one could dismiss as having been
appointed by the Shah. Once created, such a broad representative gov-
ernment might be able to block the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini,
or at least negotiate with him. I pointed out that the creation of such a
council would obviously require the agreement of the military leaders.
Though the Shah might remain as commander-in-chief of the armed
services (though not of the secret police, SAVAK) in accordance with the
1906 Constitution, his exercise of military power would be controlled by
the new government, and parliament would determine the military
budget.

460 The Private Sector

Speed was essential, since it was already tragically late in the day and
a transfer of power was “indispensable and urgent.” Any “delay or
equivocation on our part in making our position clear” could “let the
situation drift, create the impression that we [were] satisfied with the
status quo , and tempt the Shah to maintain an unrealistically unyielding
posture in his negotiations with the opposition.” Meanwhile, it would be
hard to achieve any political solution that did not have the express or
implied acquiescence of the Ayatollah Khomeini. 1 bus we urgently
needed “to open a disavowable channel of communication” with the
Ayatollah or his entourage.

One of the lessons we should have learned from experience was to
“avoid the catastrophic illusion that, because we support a foreign coun-
try, our vital interests are in every way congruent with the interests of
that country as perceived by the government in power.” We had, I
pointed out, “sometimes indulged that illusion with regard to Israel.”
Another lesson was that “we should not — as we did with President
Thieu — become the prisoner of a weakened leader out of touch with his
own people.”

No matter what actions we might take, we could not, I pointed out,
“look forward to a tranquil future for a nation as socially, economically,
and spiritually disturbed and divided as Iran.” In fact, we “might well
have to cope with an Iran torn by civil conflict and with the Soviet Union
threatening to intervene in response to leftist elements that had man-
aged to exploit the revolutionary turmoil.” Not only would that tilt the
global balance of power, but Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States would be
thrown into total shock by hostile forces just across the Gulf able to
interdict Gulf traffic. Meanwhile, I recommended close consultation with
the Saudis to acquaint them with “the painful choices associated with
security planning for the area.”

Meeting with President Carter

On December 11, 1978, I sent my memorandum to the President
and — on my insistence and over Brzezinski’s objection — it was simulta-
neously distributed to key members of the National Security Council:
the Acting Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of
the Treasury, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the head of
the CIA. That group, with whom I met on the morning of December
12, greeted my report with mixed reactions. Though Acting Secretary
of State Warren Christopher expressed his support, the views of most of
the others tended to be either qualified or negative.

That afternoon I met with President Carter and Mr. Brzezinski. The
President told me that he had carefully studied my report and, while he
agreed with some of it, he did not fully accept my recommendations. He

From Nixon to Ford to Carter 461

must, he said, continue to support the Shah so long as the Shah wished
to remain in Iran. “I cannot tell another head of state what to do.” I
answered that I was not proposing that he tell another head of state what
to do but rather that he play the role one good friend expected of another
and “give him sound advice when he desperately needs it.” “The Shah,”
1 said, “is surrounded by sycophants, he is out of touch with his people
and my impression from the telegrams is that he is eager for your advice.”

But the President was not persuaded, saying, “We shall know a great
deal more about this situation in a few days after Zbig has been in Teh-
eran.” At that I expressed visible surprise. To send Brzezinski to Teh-
eran was, I said, “with all due respect, the worst idea I ever heard.”
Within forty-five minutes after Brzezinski’s arrival at the Teheran air-
port the whole city would know about it. “We must remember,” I said,
“that the cutting edge of the revolution is anti-Western and specifically
anti-American. If Brzezinski goes to Teheran, it will immoblize the Shah,
since anything that he does after that will be regarded, Mr. President, as
an action taken on your instructions. If the Shah abdicates, the Iranians
will say that you sent one of your top advisers to force him to quit. If he
stays on and uses repressive measures, it will be because Brzezinski has
conveyed your order that he do so. Whatever he tells the Shah, his very
presence will greatly heighten and sharpen the anti-American fury and
you will be held responsible.”

President Carter looked thoughtful for a moment, then replied, “I
hadn’t thought of it in those terms. Whom should we send?” I said, “Don’t
send anyone, we have a good ambassador in Teheran; I know Sullivan
well, and he is a very able professional.”

“But,” said the President, “Sullivan doesn’t have the Shah’s confi-
dence. We should send someone who has.” (That comment, I thought
to myself, almost certainly had its source in Zahedi’s propaganda, since
he himself wanted to be the only channel to the Shah.)

“I don’t know about that,” I replied, “but it’s unimportant whether
or not Sullivan has the Shah’s confidence. The Shah will know that what-
ever your ambassador tells him comes from you. The important point is
that you pass on your advice to the Shah as promptly as possible.”

The conversation left me unsatisfied and depressed. The President
was clearly not going to take my advice about advising the Shah to trans-
fer his power. Nor did he authorize any contact with Khomeini. The
most I had done was to block Brzezinski’s projected trip, which would
clearly have dramatized America’s responsibility for everything that
happened thereafter.

On the sixteenth, I caught a plane to Florida to stay with my family
during the holidays. A day or two later, Secretary of State Vance returned
from the Middle East and telephoned me. He had, he said, read my
report and thought it extremely helpful. 1 advised him, as an old friend,

462 The Private Sector

that I had found a shockingly unhealthy situation in the National Secu-
rity Council, with Brzezinski doing everything possible to exclude the
State Department from participation in, or even knowledge of, our
developing relations with Iran, communicating directly with Zahedi to
the exclusion of our embassy, and using so-called back channel (CIA
channel) telegrams of which the State Department was unaware. Secre-
tary Vance was obviously upset. “He promised me he would not do that
again; I must put a stop to it. I ll get back into it.”

From then on, all I knew about Iranian developments came from the
newspapers or the comments of friends in the Administration. The
President continued to give verbal support to the Shah, thus running
the risk, as I suggested, of appearing as the “orchestra leader on the
Titanic .” Any approach to Khomeini was vetoed — presumably on Brze-
zinski’s advice.

The Persian Gulf — The Center of Strategic Interests

I was concerned with Iran not merely — or even principally — because
of its significance as an oil producer; much more important was its stra-
tegic location in relation to the East-West struggle. Soviet control would
not merely provide the Soviets easy access to the subcontinent, it would
give them effective control of the Persian Gulf, through which flow half
the oil supplies of the non-Communist world. So long as the nations of
the West remained slavishly dependent on Persian Gulf oil, the balance
of power would be radically altered were the Soviets ever able to decree
how many tankers could pass through the Straits of Hormuz and where
the oil could go. That would, among other things, mean the end of
Western solidarity; the hard-pressed nations of Western Europe, depen-
dent on imported oil even more than the United States, would be under
irresistible pressure to make their individual accommodations with Mos-
cow.

Since Iran constituted the whole eastern littoral of the Gulf, Soviet
domination would be disastrous for the fragile Arab nations across from
it, whose life depended on free movement in the Gulf. Nor could we
possibly defend the Gulf against Soviet expansionist ambitions unless we
could develop close working relations with Saudi Arabia and the emir-
ates and sultanates that were the Gulf s western shore.

I had first begun to worry about Middle East oil when I was working
with Jean Monnet. At the end of the Second World War, Europe’s econ-
omy had been largely coal-based, but, with the discovery of vast pools of
cheap oil under the Arabian deserts in the early 1950s, the Europeans
had been faced with the need for a totally new energy policy to reduce
their reliance on mines that were rapidly becoming uneconomically deep
with coal seams excessively thin. Using high-cost coal, Europe could not

From Nixon to Ford to Carter 463

compete with United States industry, which was already shifting toward
oil and later toward natural gas in response to market forces. I had dis-
cussed the hazaids of this shift with Monnet when he was president of
the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community and had
given him a biief note on the subject. In that note I had called attention
t° the fact that, in betting its energy future on Middle East oil, Europe
was acting on certain implicit assumptions that should be carefully
examined.

I he first assumption was that the oil-producing countries of the Mid-
dle East and elsewhere in the Third World would never achieve the
sophistication and unity enabling them to dictate oil prices. The major
international oil companies could, as I then saw it, continue for a long
while to dominate Middle Eastern oil production.

The second assumption, parallel to the first, was that the oil-
producing countries would have neither the will nor skill to use oil for
their political objectives.

The third assumption was far more troublesome: the gamble that oil
production would never be interrupted by political instability or war.
The Arab world was, I noted, inherently unstable; some of its political
structures were anachronisms, and I could not see most of them lasting
more than a few decades.

Finally, just to be comprehensive, my note mentioned a fourth
assumption: that we could keep the oil-producing areas out of the Soviet
orbit.

When I gave Monnet my paper, he had his mind on other things;
shifting to oil was, he thought, essential if European industry were to
compete. Yet I recalled my four assumptions when oil prices began their
almost vertical rise at the beginning of 1974. During my years as a direc-
tor of the Standard Oil Company of California, I had learned the signif-
icance of Middle Eastern oil. In the early 1970s, an old friend from war-
time days, Emilio G. Collado, then executive vice-president of what is
now Exxon, showed me statistics and projections foreshadowing the
financial distortions and dislocations that might be created by the
expanding revenues accruing to Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states
as world oil demand increased. Even with oil at pre-1973 prices, Col-
lado’s projections were disturbing, and, largely inspired by my conver-
sations with him, in 1972 I made a speech in London emphasizing the
financial problems such a transfer of wealth would entail.

When oil prices thrust sharply upward following the 1973 Arab-Israeli
war, my concern was multiplied by a factor whose upper limits are not
yet known. 1 he financial and economic dislocations threatened by vault-
ing oil prices could, in my view, be effectively managed only with the
collaboration of the oil-producing states, yet the Nixon Administration
was foolishly approaching the problem as a confrontation between OPEC

464 The Private Sector

and the West, indulging in meaningless tough talk and that windy fatuity
of the copywriters, “Project Independence.”

On September 17, 1974, I made a speech at a seminar in London in
which I spelled out my concerns. I took as my point of departure Keynes’s
classic work, The Economic Consequences of the Peace , which I have earlier
discussed in chapter 3. Keynes foresaw that reparations and war debts
to America would drain central Europe of capital and set in train dan-
gerous forces, which, in fact, later helped bring about the Second World
War. Now we again faced the prospect of vast and increasing capital
Hows to the OPEC countries. What Keynes had called the “transfer prob-
lem” we now glibly referred to as “recycling.” If we did not find a solu-
tion promptly and incisively, we might face a severe disruption in world
financial markets that could once more create the conditions for serious
political troubles.

Either we would respond to an enormous challenge with initiatives
of comparable scale and scope or we would inevitably fall back into the
old defensive, restrictive, nationalistic habits that could Balkanize our
economies and precipitate depression. While we argued among our-
selves, poor countries were suffering dangerous deficits and heading for
financial crises.

“What we must do,” I argued, “is to seek, by a combined effort of oil-
producing and oil-consuming nations, to buy time for the world to adjust
to the increased cost of energy,” and for this I suggested the creation “of
a new institution which might be established alongside the World Bank
and International Monetary Fund with capital subscribed equally 50
percent by the OPEC nations and the remaining 50 percent divided
among seven or eight leading non-Communist industrial powers. I
elaborated the scheme, suggesting a type of debt investment the new
institution might issue and techniques for dealing with currency fluctua-
tions.

We should, I argued, stop thinking in terms of a destructive confron-
tation with the OPEC countries and try to see the problem as it appeared
from Riyadh or Kuwait or I eheran, recognizing that, in the famous
aphorism of Blaise Pascal, “What is truth on this side of the Pyrenees is
error on the other side.” Oil prices had, I pointed out, been held at
abysmally low levels for years, and the OPEC countries had some justice
in their claim that their increased oil prices were merely correcting the
terms of trade.

My speech fell on deaf ears. Not only did the audience fail to respond
but the Nobel prize winning economist, Professor Milton Friedman,
speaking on the same platform, emphatically disagreed. Why do you
make so much of the problem?” he asked me. “Don t you realize that the
OPEC cartel won’t last six months? Meanwhile, no one will be hurt by
the increased oil prices; they’re already being offset by inflation.

From Nixon to Ford to Carter 465

I hereafter, the locusts ate the years. The American government still
proceeded on the ‘‘apparent assumption,” as I said in a speech two months
later, “that hot air can replace petroleum as a source of energy — an
ingenious thesis but with little scientific support.”

Now, eight years after my London speech, we are still pettifogging,
though we have made some slow progress in our thinking. The countries
of the International Monetary Fund are at last planning an international
mechanism to achieve the objective to which I had addressed my speech.
Great nations learn slowly.

Oil as a Political Weapon

Even more ominous than the financial dislocations from vaulting oil
price increases were threats to the continued availability of oil. During
the Suez affair in 1956 and again in 1967, some Arab nations half-
heartedly tested an oil embargo. On both occasions the United States,
then still an export surplus oil producer, made up any shortfalls. Now
that had changed. The West was growing increasingly dependent on
Middle Eastern oil, but making no serious effort to settle the Arab-Isra-
eli dispute, and, by the summer of 1973, a blow-up seemed inevitable.
On August 14, 1973, I made a speech at the Aspen Institute in Colorado
that concluded with the following dark prediction:

What is . . . likely, it seems to me, is that even the conservative and basically
pio-Westein Arab states such as Saudi Arabia will be forced by the pressure of
the more radical Arabs to use oil as a political weapon and to threaten a freeze
on expansion or a slow-down or cut-back not merely for conservation reasons
but as the basis for a political ultimatum. No longer will they expend their pro-
duction to satisfy growing Western demands unless the West changes its policies
toward the Arab-Israeli struggle. . .

Though I know of no easy solution to the problem, it is essential that we face
this calamitous prospect not as a remote possibility but , in my view, as almost a certainty.
It does no good to deny reality. It is something for which we should be urgently
planning. (Italics added.)

Within two months, the Yom Kippur war started and the Arabs
imposed an oil embargo. This time, the United States had no surplus to
meet shortfalls.

Today, the dangers of a curtailment or even total blockage of the oil
flow depend more than ever on the last three assumptions listed in my
note to Monnet. Can we, by realistic diplomacy, resolve the Arab-Israeli
dispute that may drive the Saudis and other Arab oil producers to impose
another embargo? Will there be further disruptive conflicts involving
oil-producing states, such as the Iran-Iraq war? Will other oil-producing
states suffer a political breakdown comparable to that in Iran? Will we

466 The Private Sector

be able to keep the Soviet Union from spreading its tentacles around the
Gulf area?

Centrality of the Palestinian Issue

After the collapse of the Second Sinai negotiations in March 1975, I
urged Henry Kissinger to tackle the urgent problem of the Palestinians.
We must, I argued, find the ways and means of ending the Israeli occu-
pation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and providing the inhabitants
of those areas the opportunity to decide how and by whom they wished
to be ruled. The settlement of that issue was essential to the stability of
Middle East oil-producing states and particularly those in the Gulf area.

I made the point in a meeting of the “elder statesmen” on March 31 and
April 2, in Washington. Further progress through “step-by-step” diplo-
macy was, Kissinger was then inclined to concede, played out, and I urged
that he shift his attention toward an overall settlement. But when he saw
a chance to resume shuttling, the temptation to achieve another widely
hailed triumph proved irresistible.

On November 17, 1977, I was in Tel Aviv, participating in a seminar
on the Arab-Israeli conflict, when word came of President Sadat’s deci-
sion to fly to Jerusalem. That night I found most of my Israeli friends
euphoric; the excitement was pervasive and contagious, I was impressed
by their deep yearning for peace, and could not blame them for wanting
a deal with Egypt that would relieve Israel of its greatest military danger.
With Egypt neutralized, the Israelis clearly had the military competence
to deal with a war limited to only one front. But did that augur well for
the long term?

Almost alone of the thousands in Israel that night, 1 was troubled by
the longer-range implications of Sadat’s mission. In spite of his dis-
claimers, his visit would almost inevitably lead, as 1 saw it, to a bilateral
deal between Egypt and Israel. Immunizing Israel from the threat of a
two-front war would relieve it of pressure to settle the Palestinian issue.

On September 8, 1978, just as the meeting at Camp David was about
to begin, I discussed the problem with President Carter and was
impressed with his determination that the negotiations must include an
agreed plan for settling the Palestinian issue. Yet — as was foreseeable —
once the Camp David talks got underway, they acquired a momentum
of their own, resulting in little more than a simple bilateral deal in which
we bought the sands of the Sinai for an exorbitant price from Israel,
then paid Egypt a large price to take them back. The second phase deal-
ing with the Palestinian issue was clearly an infeasible afterthought.

For almost a decade I have talked and written persistently on our
need to focus on our own national interests in the Middle East, But I
have made few converts. Though I have received much sympathetic mail,

Over and Out 46 7

little is being done to arrest or deflect the strong tides of our politically
warped policy. Sooner or later, the evolution of events will provide its
own irrefutable documentation. That will not be a happy day for Amer-
ica.

30. Over and Out

To celebrate my seventieth birthday in December 1979, I
reread Cicero s De Senectute , not as I had once done, in Latin, but this
time in translation. I was, after all, not preparing for an examination but
performing a ritual act to celebrate my breaking the Biblical age barrier
of three score years and ten, and I had been inspired to turn to Cicero
by a comment in a column by Mary McGrory. “Ball has,” she wrote,
reached that point in life where he is beyond ambition.”

I find that a comforting thought; like Cicero, I take pleasure in the
compensations of advanced years. Yet I cannot easily adjust to the role
of mere innocent bystander — or at least accept that role without noisy
protest — since I feel neither resigned nor complacent. Is it merely the
chill of old age that induces my sense of apprehension and impatience
about the world? That seems hard to accept.

Whenever during my diplomatic years some catastrophic event caught
America by surprise, commentators (omniscient by their own admission)
would point out why the State Department should have anticipated and
prepared for the event. Sometimes, of course, they were right; when my
colleagues and I looked back, we often wondered why we had not been
more perceptive. Now, as a not-so-innocent bystander, I watch for trends
and premonitory events that might foreshadow disaster. It is not easy.
One must not merely look carefully at the current scene but also venture
predictions of years to come. Though the latter exercise is implicitly haz-
ardous, it is a risk I can afford since one comforting perquisite of old
age is the freedom to speculate about the future without being available
for rebuke when events refute my crystal-gazing.

The Current Mood

One should perhaps discount my more somber forebodings. Spec-
tators who have once been players are notorious for making critical com-
ments from the sidelines and offering grim forecasts of the outcome.

\ et I am not alone in detecting a sense of unease and disenchantment
pervading our bountiful land. We have never fully recovered from the
anger and divisiveness of the latter ig6os, and I find increasing evidence

468 The Private Sector

of the baleful mark left by our Vietnam experience on almost all aspects
of American life — social, economic, political — while at the same time it
distorted, undercut, and diminished America’s relations with other gov-
ernments and peoples throughout the world.

That dismal war was not, however, the sole cause of our miseries,
merely the beginning of a chain of events that has contributed to our
present unhappiness. The list is familiar: Watergate, a falling dollar,
relentless inflation, high interest rates, a menacing Soviet military buildup,
and — most important — a succession of weak Presidents. I cannot, of
course, sort out the intricate causal relations implicit in these develop-
ments not yet clearly defined. They took place during a time of major —
and long overdue — social changes. Throughout the first two decades after
World War II, we were, no doubt, excessively self-confident; but repeated
rebuffs at the hands of poor, backward, preindustrial nations have since
forced a more modest assessment of the dimensions of our nation’s
power. In Vietnam, we fought an irrelevant war to an inglorious conclu-
sion; in Iran, we were forced to stand by impotently when our country-
men were kidnapped by a clerical cabal that was the negation of
government. Meanwhile, for eight years we have been powerless to resist
the financial decisions of a group of developing countries combining
under the acronym of OPEC.

Of course, each of these incidents had a different explanation. In
Vietnam, we underestimated the driving force of our adversary’s fierce
commitment and the marginal nature of our country’s own interests. In
Teheran we learned with mounting frustration that kidnappers can, by
exploiting human compassion, effectively reverse power relations. In
trying to cope with OPEC’s mounting oil prices, all oil-consuming
nations — rich and poor — yielded to the powerful leverage of collective
decisions by producers who control the supply of a critical resource.

These unexpected shocks, compounded by other symbols of weak-
ness and disorder, have revived tendencies recurrent throughout our
history that most of us thought we had outgrown: anti-intellectualism,
reinforced by the emergence of obscurantist religious cults, a weakness
for conspiratorial interpretations of otherwise explicable developments
(such as automatically crediting the Soviets with turbulence in inherently
unstable countries), and a drift not toward isolationism (America is, I
think, finally cured of that delusion) but rather toward an ignorant and
absentminded unilateralism.

Unfortunately, a country preoccupied with transient minor irrita-
tions can easily be distracted from larger dangers, and it seems to me
that we are now facing the world’s longer-term predicaments with lim-
ited vision and a short attention span. Many of us, I sometimes fancy,
are behaving like those legendary fishermen on the Seine embankment
in June 1940 who were so absorbed in catching their supper that they

Over and Out 469

failed to look up when the Nazi tanks rolled into Paris. Our civilization
and the institutions we have inherited or created — from family to gov-
ernment— are suffering premonitory tremors from seismic strains and
tensions. But we ignore them, largely because we find the world too com-
plex to be understood, managed, or even fully observed, and the dan-
gers about us too confusing and ugly to be frankly acknowledged. So we
sublimate our anxieties by irascibly cultivating our own gardens, com-
plaining about the neighbors, and worrying about how and where we
can sell the produce. In the meantime, we let our once sturdy political
and social structures be critically undermined by inadequate mainte-
nance, neglect, and reckless misuse, while old and essential assumptions
are left to crumble and are discarded through mindless prejudice and
irrational actions.

The End of Innocence

Mankind’s gravest danger is, of course, the nuclear bomb, which
generations younger than mine have always known. I learned to live
with the potential of nuclear death only late in life and cannot accept it
as a normal and permanent aspect of our human existence. As a youth,
I could never have imagined any hovering threat other than hellfire if I
misbehaved, and my parents were too kind and rational to hold that
threat over my head. During the first decade of the new century, in
which I was born, the Western world was lighted by an ebullient opti-
mism. With the popularization of Darwin’s concept of evolution, pros-
pects seemed bright indeed. Renan foresaw mankind gradually achieving
a more perfect state through the growing dominance of reason. Herbert
Spencer, interpreting Darwin, predicted that, with humankind’s evolu-
tionary adaptation, the “ultimate development of the ideal man is logi-
cally certain.”

To be sure, confidence in man’s perfectibility did not last long. When
I was four years old, Europe was caught up in the first of two great civil
wars that shook belief in the inevitability — even the possibility — of prog-
ress. After the carnage of Passchendaele, the Somme, gas warfare, and
rotting bodies in the trenches, came dark prognoses. I well remember
my first encounter with Spengler’s The Decline of the West in the 1920s,
and I was haunted by the despairing lamentations of Paul Valery. As a
student, I turned in disillusion from the cloying patriotism of Rupert
Brooke to the bitter realism of Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and Sieg-
fried Sassoon. Then the decade ended with a cataclysmic depression that
raised festering doubts about Western institutions. Later I encountered
a wholly new area of speculation when Aldous Huxley published his
brilliant anti-utopian Brave New World , depicting a sterile bureaucracy
perverting biology to create humanoid robots as mankind’s slaves.

4 jo The Private Sector

I could — and did — dismiss Spengler as a dyspeptic German theorist
and shrug off Huxley’s fantasy as grim satire; but Hitler and the Second
World War conclusively ended my benign illusions. No one could over-
look the shattering message of the the Nuremburg trials that man had
made small, if any, progress toward perfectibility. Hitler and his scrof-
ulous gang had shown themselves fully as depraved and brutal as the
most sadistic medieval tyrants. Ghengis Khan and Attila were not, as I
had assumed, merely products of a dark satanic period; rich and pow-
erful nations could still produce monsters as leaders.

That thought gained a new malign significance with the splitting of
the atom and our destructive use of that knowledge at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Armed with the bomb, some new power-obsessed lunatic could,
as Hitler had only threatened to do, slam the world’s door so hard as to
bring down the whole edifice. Thus, I was dismayed though not sur-
prised, when nuclear weapons became available to the ugly, repressive,
Soviet regime of Josef Stalin. No longer could we rule out the possiblity
that human life might someday — even soon — perish in a pyrotechnic
Armageddon.

The advent of the nuclear weapon inspired in my generation long
thoughts about last things and revived the ancient anxiety that man might
destroy himself if he let excessive curiosity push his exploration of nature
beyond the frontiers of the forbidden. Until then, we fortunate few on
this broad continent had felt protected by mighty oceans, but with the
advent of nuclear weapons we faced the abhorrent reality that, though
our nation was the most powerful in the world, we were now vulnerable
to bombs on our cities and firesides quite as much as old Europe. That
marked the end of our innocence — our exemption from the fears other
men and women had always known.

Our ancestors had thought it normal to live with dragons and evil
spirits, with Zeus and his thunderbolts, with Thor and his hammer.
Medieval man suffered the threat of eternal damnation, and our more
recent ancestors were chastened by the vision of a stern God. Though
the emancipating skepticism of scientific discipline allayed the fears of
divine retribution for a growing number, their respite lasted only briefly.
It may be that the human psyche requires a sword of Damocles; in
any event, we now used our new-found knowledge to fabricate a man-
made substitute for hell — the threat of universal immolation ignited by
our own willful action. We hung nuclear death like a menacing sword
over mankind and we must live with the threat that it may destroy us all.

Our first reaction to our new vulnerability was irrational and
demeaning. How could we have suddenly become as subject to destruc-
tion as other less favored peoples? Throughout the ugly McCarthy
period, some searched for scapegoats on the vainglorious assumption
that only by stealing our secrets could the Soviets have been able to build

Over and Out 471

a bomb. What I found particularly repulsive in the ensuing hysteria was
the realization of how little we had progressed beyond the fifteenth cen-
tury; now a new form of St. Vitus' Dance afflicted even men and women
I had previously regarded as intelligent. It turned friend against friend,
destroying trust in human decency and producing a nation of informers.

Yet in time the fever abated; our native good sense and decency
returned; and, during the national hangover that followed the McCar-
thy orgy, the prospect of nuclear catastrophe became, for most people,
more a figure of speech than a dour possibility. If men and women live
long enough on a fault line destined to produce a major earthquake,
they cease, in the years between catastrophes, to think much about it —
or more important — to do much about it. History, after all, is second-
guessing and only future generations know the later chapters. The Mal-
raux quotation to which Speer alluded sums up the problem vividly: “A
fish is badly placed forjudging what the aquarium looks like from out-
side.”

Our adjustment to the bomb — too easily achieved — reduced the pos-
siblity of nuclear war to a misfiled datum of day-to-day existence. Those
specialized men and women who continue to think and write about it
concern themselves primarily with military tactics and academic specu-
lation expressed in a vocabulary that reduces predictions of mass human
slaughter to pedantic periphrasis and dessicated statistics.

The Need for a Fresh Approach

Meanwhile, scientists and engineers the world over are sedulously
trying to improve man’s ability to kill his fellow human beings in increas-
ing numbers; there seems no end to it. We are prisoners of a process
spinning out of our control and it takes no special perception to recog-
nize that, unless we halt the production of ever more powerful nuclear
weapons, we shall sooner or later blow one another up. Who can believe
that if we endlessly pervert every scientific breakthrough to the loath-
some objective of mutual murder, we shall not, sooner or later, produce
a cataclysm? Yet we pretend that there is no special urgency in reaching
agreements to halt the process, that we can take our time while, in the
meantime, building more bombs and increasingly exotic systems to per-
fect our capability to wipe out civilization.

That denies rationality; I cannot accept the sense of futility and res-
ignation implied in our current failure of realism or decision, yet we
cannot, of course, solve the problem by ourselves. My negative views on
unilateral disarmament are best explained by a parable I once wrote
about a small community that had for centuries been troubled by disas-
trous floods. Finally, with great effort, the townspeople built a huge dam
that kept their lands dry and fruitful for three decades. Then a new

472 The Private Sector

generation, unhappy because the dam was obscuring the sunset, decided
to tear it down. Their reasoning was impeccable: “Since we’ve had no
floods for thirty years, it’s obvious that we no longer need such an ugly
structure.” So, after holding a rock festival, they blew up the dam and,
as one of the young leaders remarked, “Man, was that the year of
Aquarius!”

But, if we must reject unilateral nuclear disarmament as a craven
abandonment of all Western values, the human race should still be able
to agree on the actions needed to regain control of its destiny. In the
early 1970s, the American and Soviet leaders seemed to be making slow
progress toward some common rules of mutual restraint. The dialogue
between East and West acquired a new civility, and we established
arrangements for cooperation in a number of areas. No doubt these
limited achievements inspired inflated expectations, but they did suggest
that progress could be made once each side began to recognize the
requirements of the other.

Just what happened to detente is not entirely clear; the current glib
answers are less than fully persuasive. Nauseated by the sour taste of its
Vietnam experience, America suffered a delayed overreaction to the
Soviet Union’s efforts to exploit situations of turbulence with low-risk,
low-cost adventures. Moscow acquired an influence in Angola and Ethio-
pia by using Cuban surrogates, and it established a base of operations in
South Yemen. But Soviet opportunism was to be expected. It was not
the first time that Moscow had sought to build centers of subversion in
Africa, though its previous efforts all ultimately failed. In spite of a sub-
stantial commitment of resources, the Soviets were expelled from Ghana,
Guinea, and finally from the most important North African nation, Egypt.
(Had we suffered a similar reversal, the cries of “who lost Egypt.''” would
have marred our political rhetoric for years.) Finally, the Soviets’ deploy-
ment of soldiers and tanks in Afghanistan evoked from the Carter
Administration cries of outrage more suggestive of a raped maiden than
an experienced nation. Democracies are given to hyperbole and few
bothered to note that the decision of the Soviets to commit their military
forces did not alter their existing position in the country; it merely con-
firmed a political coup that had taken place more than a year before,
while at the same time subjecting the Soviets to substantial strains and
costs. Our reaction would have been far less shrill had the Soviets moved
at a time when Iran was caught up in a revolutionary frenzy and the
chancellories of the oil-consuming nations were concentrating their
attention on the Persian Gulf.

For a variety of reasons — including the exaggeration inevitable in the
media’s need for drama — we have tended to build up Soviet threats while
ignoring or forgetting Soviet retreats and failures. On balance, the Soviets
would seem to have gained little net military or political advantage by

Over and Out 475

their latest decade of adventures; their expulsion from Egypt more than
offset any strategic benefits they may have gained in Angola, Ethiopia,
Yemen, or Afghanistan. But what has principally upset the Western cap-
itals — and particularly Washington — has been the formidable buildup of
Soviet arms at a substantially higher rate than our own. That buildup
began soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the Soviet lead-
ership was brought face-to-face with its inferior military competence in
a region dominated by United States power. Thereafter, it has persis-
tently strengthened its strategic capability, extending its military reach
beyond the beaches of Eurasia by intensively building ships and aircraft.

The significance of this rapid military expansion is a central subject
of dispute. The Reagan Administration has uncritically inferred an
aggressive expansionist intent but the point has not been proved. The
Soviets’ extension of their military reach by ships and aircraft could well
have been inspired by nothing more malign than a craving for recogni-
tion as a superpower on an equal footing with the United States. Or,
alternatively, the Soviets may have been moved primarily by atavistic
fears of invasion and what they conceived to be the implacable hostility
of the United States. Throughout history, the Russians have suffered
periodic invasions from the East and, twice in modern times, have been
invaded from the West. Certainly history, memory, and comparative
population magnitudes largely explain Moscow’s commitment of a mil-
lion men to guard the long frontier separating Siberia from China; for
in the whole of the USSR east of the Urals (with a land area twice the
size of the United States) there are only fifty-eight million people of whom
thirty-seven million — or roughly two-thirds — are non-Slavic, while six or
seven hundred million people live in the eastern one-third of China —
an area not much larger than Argentina.

If the Soviets’ buildup of a vast, costly military establishment does
not by itself prove an intention to wage large-scale war, it does suggest
that the Soviets will, as they have consistently done, continue to take
advantage of opportunities to extend their influence just as we do, though
their methods are cruder and crueler than ours and we, of course, have
no territorial ambitions. Why then do they build up their military strength
beyond the relatively modest forces they might require for limited
operations? Perhaps it is that once having been programmed to expand
Soviet forces, the bureaucratic machinery of an insensitive military-
industrial complex has developed a momentum the Kremlin can no
longer control. With bellicose noises from Washington and an inade-
quate hold over its own military sector, the Soviet civilian leaders are
unable to assure the Soviet generals that the United States is not threat-
ening Soviet interests.

I give some credence to this last explanation. During my years in the
State Department, Chairman Khrushchev complained more than once

474 The Private Sector

that by taking a hard line, our Government undermined his ability to
resist the demands of his generals. Though these were obviously self-
serving complaints, they should not be wholly discounted at a time when
the Reagan Administration is behaving as though we were already at war
with the Soviet Union. Almost every official speech contains a condem-
nation of Moscow, and even the most localized tribal or religious quar-
rels — including squalid disputes over boundaries — are seen in terms of
the East-West struggle. Our official statements are shot through with
Cold War bombast; political problems are approached almost entirely in
military terms and — most dangerous of all — our leaders seem on the
verge of embracing the heresy most likely to destroy us: the acceptance
of nuclear bombs as weapons of war and not merely instruments of
deterrence. SALT II, they contend, deserved to be rejected; in spite of
talk geared for public consumption, they appear reconciled to the
defeatist view that we shall never be able to break the cycle of escala-
tion — even implying doubt that such interruption is necessary; instead,
they seem to argue, we must concentrate our energies on devising new
and more effective means of mutual extermination.

Thus America and the Soviet Union are behaving like two boys in a
schoolyard, impelled to bluster until they fight simply because neither
knows how to quit without risk of being struck by the other. We should
not — so our politicians and our self-proclaimed strategic experts end-
lessly repeat — try to bargain with the Soviets except from a position of
strength, which means, in their stultifying jargon, that we must surpass
Moscow in nuclear weaponry, even though the Russians are quite as
determined to surpass us. One even hears again that illusory concept of
“linkage.” When I was a small boy running family errands to the butcher
shop, the word “linkage” was used as synonymous with “baloney”; I have
seen nothing since to change that view. It is certainly a misleading con-
cept when interpreted, as our government now implies, to mean that if
the Soviets should try to extend their power anywhere in the world, we
should punish them by refusing to negotiate to control the arms race.
What arrant nonsense! Is an effort to gain control over a mutually costly
and hazardous process a favor we accord the other side? Is it something
we can afford to deny the Soviets by way of a sanction? Must we inevit-
ably go on squandering our resources to multiply our capacity for over-
kill until some unlucky conjunction of events leads to the weapons being
fired off?

If we are to break the momentum, it seems to me, we must calm
down and change our approach to the Soviet Union, and the Reagan
Administration must break its addiction to language even more acri-
monious than the Kremlin’s own vocabulary of invective. Such strident
threats, demands, and abuse can only strengthen the hard-line elements
in the Soviet hierarchy and reduce the Kremlin’s power to restrain its

Over and Out 475

military. It is particularly dangerous at a time when the Soviet Union is
about to undergo a major change of leadership, since evidence of Amer-
ican hostility could strengthen the position of the hard-liners in the
succession.

1 think it essential, therefore, that we abandon Cold War stereotypes
and undertake a fresh approach. The first condition to such an approach
is for our government to reject the catastrophic conclusion that nuclear
warheads are usable weapons of war and that there is such a thing as
winning a nuclear conflict. That is the most dangerous of all current
delusions. It is based on a fantasy: the assumption that under certain
unspecified circumstances we could fire off nuclear weapons in limited
number and still avoid a full nuclear exchange. 1 do not believe that for
a moment. Even one tactical nuclear weapon fired at a Soviet target
would, I am confident, lead to an almost certain escalation. One of the
wisest of America’s military thinkers, Admiral Noel Gayler, has stated
the realities succinctly: “There is,” he has written, “no sensible military
use for any of our nuclear forces: intercontinental, theater or tactical.” 1
Their only use is for deterrence and political effect.

The second condition is to recognize that, whatever their hegemonic
ambitions, the Soviet leaders are not lunatics. No doubt they will seize
opportunities to try to extend Soviet authority without excessive risk, but
it is equally clear that, though they crave power, they are not seeking
suicide. We are far more likely to start a war by indulging false fears
than by a cool appraising view; the last thing we need is for America to
lead a jihad.

By purging our public rhetoric of the twin fallacies of limited nuclear
war and a belief in a suicidal Soviet leadership, we should be able to free
ourselves to talk quietly and rationally with the Kremlin leaders about
the basic issue of mutual survival. Emphasizing the destructive path on
which the superpowers are now engaged, we should propose a con-
certed step toward breaking the cycle of weapons escalation and reduc-
ing the danger to both sides — a step designed not merely to contain the
pace of the arms race but drastically to reduce existing nuclear arsenals.
Such an approach will obviously not evoke an immediate favorable
response, but pursued quietly and lucidly over a period of time, it might
calm Soviet anxieties and restore a sufficient basis of mutual confidence
to permit some progress to be made.

It is not enough merely to create the conditions for straightforward
talk with the Soviet Union unless we have something to say. That requires
changes, not only in the methods by which we evolve new weapons sys-
tems, but in the procedures used in conducting arms control negotia-
tions. Looking back over the history of nuclear escalation, I am dismayed
to find that the United States, in almost all cases, took the first initiative
in creating new weapons systems. It was we, not the Soviet Union, who

476 The Private Sector

led in the development of solid fuel missiles; the creation of MRV war-
heads and then MIRV warheads; the improvement of accuracy that per-
mitted counter-force and not merely counter-value weapons; and the
development of cruise missiles and submarine-launched missile systems.
In almost every case, the thrust of our new technology has made arms
control increasingly difficult. Had we sought negotiations before trans-
lating MIRV technology into operational weapons, we might well have
reached agreement with the Soviet Union not to take this step. In that
case, the Soviets’ heavy missiles would have become obsolete; our land-
based Minuteman system would have remained substantially invulnera-
ble, and the problems of arms control would have been greatly simpli-
fied. Today our government is under pressure to develop an antiballistic
missile system that could be put in place when current, temporary
restrictions expire. We may soon be tempted to put missiles in outer
space despite commitments to the contrary and to develop basing sys-
tems for land-based missiles that, by making verification practically
impossible, would destroy any serious hope of stopping the arms race
this side of catastrophe.

Part of the stimulus for the development of new systems is, of course,
rivalry among our military services, which is a luxury we can no longer
afford. We have built three distinct missile systems — the so-called triad —
but, since each service insists on expanding and improving its own sys-
tem, we fail to exploit the advantages of redundancy. So long as service
rivalries and service politics dominate our nuclear policies, I see no hope
of stopping the arms race.

We shall certainly not stop it if we continue to negotiate within the
pattern now established for SALT talks. Today every American conces-
sion must be carefully tailored to satisfy the ambitions of each service as
well as the scholastic speculations of nuclear strategists and the political
demands of vested interest groups in the Administration and Congress.
Realistically, there is only one way to break out of this suffocating strait-
jacket — to propose some method of across-the-board nuclear arms
reduction that will penalize each system equally.

Experience with SALT I and SALT II has amply shown that we can
never make real progress if we merely seek to trade off one item for
another. As I have pointed out in earlier chapters, America spent many
years seeking to bring about the reduction of trade barriers by that tedious
and protracted method, and the results achieved were relatively small.
It was against that background that, in 1961, I urged President Kennedy
that we seek legislative authority to make percentage cuts across the
board — the practice used in eliminating trade barriers among the mem-
ber nations of the European common market. The result was the Ken-
nedy Round of trade negotiations, which accomplished far more than
had other efforts in the past.

Over and Out 47 7

Our best hope of making significant progress toward controlling the
nuclear arms race is to propose a similar straightforward formula. We
are playing scholastic games when we try to equate our Polaris seaborne
missile with a Soviet land-based missile, and it is unrealistic to think that
by trying to construct such artificial equivalencies, we could achieve a
significant reduction of nuclear arsenals and the maintenance of the arms
competition at a lower level of intensity.

Our so-called nuclear experts insist, however, that an across-the-board
cut in nuclear arms might excessively reduce some weapons systems in
which we have a substantial advantage. Some of our weary trade nego-
tiators made precisely the same argument when we first proposed across-
the-board tariff cuts: it would produce trade distortions, benefit our
trading partners more than ourselves, and hurt some of our industries.
It is the kind of objection, narrowly focused on a statistical item-for-
item approach, that in weapons negotiations ignores the larger pur-
pose and makes serious progress impossible. Each side possesses enor-
mous overkill capabilities, and there is no rational basis to believe that
the security of either would be jeopardized by substantial across-the-board
percentage reductions — phased over a period of years.

I know, of couse, that this is heresy to the professional arms negoti-
ators who, out of exhaustion and disappointment and an uncritical
acceptance of conventional wisdom, have tended to constrict their think-
ing to the pattern of the past. If we are ever to break the present
momentum of competitive escalation, the necessary decisions will not be
made by technicians but only by a major act of will at the top levels of
each government.

In recent years the Kremlin’s leaders have repeatedly asserted that
the USSR would not be the first nation to use nuclear weapons, yet the
United States has shied away from a similar “no-first-use” declaration.
Since we think of ourselves as committed to peace, our posture would
seem anomalous and, in principle, there should be good reason for us
to make such a statement. After all, if each of the two superpowers were
to renounce “first use” and mean it, nuclear weapons would cease to
have any meaning either for war or deterrence. Indeed, the situation
would resemble that contemplated by a statute enacted by a Western
state in the early days of American railroading which provided that, if
two trains met at an intersection, neither should proceed until the other
had passed by.

The fact that the United States is restrained from making such a
declaration goes to the heart of our predicament. The theory of flexible
response on which our NATO defense has long been postulated assumes
that if Europe were threatened by Soviet invasion, the United States might
at some point raise the level of violence by using at least tactical nuclear
weapons. That, it seems to me, points to our Western weakness for,

478 The Private Sector

though some nuclear theologians contend that tactical nuclear weapons
could be used without triggering a major nuclear exchange, that is, to
my mind, pure fantasy.

Unhappily, we cannot renounce this nuclear fantasy since the West
has not prepared itself to resist Soviet aggression solely by conventional
means. Thus, having sought to buy defense cheaply we now find our-
selves in a trap of our own making.

Here the problem becomes fuzzy and theological, for many in the
West tend to believe that only the balance of terror — the threat of mutual
nuclear destruction — has enabled Europe to avoid war for almost four
decades, and that if we eliminated the nuclear threat, the Soviets might
risk a major expansionist adventure and plunge Europe once again into
chaos.

In philosophical terms, I find that a highly disturbing thesis; it seems
to suggest that mankind can restrain its own bloodlust only if threatened
by hellfire and, if men no longer believe in a hell of divine fabrication,
we must make and maintain one of our own creation. It is not a thesis of
which humankind should be proud. What an insult to homo sapiens!

The End of the Nuclear Oligopoly

Even were we to succeed in reducing the arsenals of the present
superpowers, we would have resolved only part of the problem. We can
no longer afford to base our survival on the wishful belief that fear of
reciprocal murder will prevent a nuclear collision. The assumption of a
balance of terror posited on a nuclear oligopoly of the Soviets and three
Western democracies is rapidly losing its factual basis. More and more
nations of dubious stability and responsibility have obtained — or are about
to obtain — their own nuclear arsenals: an insidious process we call, in a
pallid coinage, “nuclear proliferation.” Thus, we now face a danger of
nuclear war that neither superpower can prevent or control, even though
both might like to.

Consider the third-class powers that have already acquired nuclear
weapons, or seem likely to do so in the next five years — Israel, India,
Pakistan, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, South Korea, and Taiwan,
while during the coming decade, Egypt, Libya, Iran, and Iraq may be
added to the list. Every day brings more imminent danger that one of
those nations, in a moment of fear, panic, or revolutionary frenzy, may
detonate a fatal bomb. As the list discloses, the common denominator
of the nations seeking nuclear weapons is their location in areas where
passions are high and conflict endemic. That is why they want the bomb,
and precisely why they should not have it.

Though the current American Administration tends to blame the
Soviets for all of our ills, it is Western democracies — including the United
States — that have spread the ability to make nuclear weapons. For this

Over and Out 4 79

we should feel a deep collective shame. America initiated the misguided
though well-intentioned, program for scattering nuclear reactors all over
the world under the beguiling slogan of “Atoms for Peace,” and some
Western democracies have recklessly spread nuclear knowledge and
facilities out of greed and commercial advantage. The result has cast
capitalism in a bad light, since, insulated from either the ambitions of
private entrepreneurs or the seductions of philanthropy, the Soviets have
rigorously abstained from assisting the spread of nuclear capability.
Meanwhile, the problem is getting so far out of hand that only heroic
measures offer hope of even slowing the process.

Instead of merely shrugging off proliferation as inevitable, we should,
in concert with other nuclear-supplying powers — including the Soviet
Union — take every possible initiative to halt the current trend. That
requires, among other things, that we and the Soviets make substantial
progress toward gaining control of our own nuclear arms race, since that
is the condition on which signatory nations have agreed to comply with
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It also means devising such initia-
tives as nuclear-free zones — particularly one for the Middle East, which
is the center of world danger. We dare not delay such a project, as some
would have us do, until the tensions and conflicts of the area have been
resolved. It is precisely because those tensions and conflicts may lead to
the use of nuclear weapons that we need to keep them out of the Middle
East.

I look forward with cold apprehension to the day when a third-class
nation involved in a local conflict fires the first nuclear weapon at a
neighbor. How will other countries react if the attacked nation is allied
in some manner to one or the other of the superpowers? By bombing
the attacker? If a hard-pressed Israel, for example, should drop a nuclear
bomb on an Arab capital, would the Soviet Union respond with a bomb
on Pel Aviv? And what would we do? Any nuclear explosion anywhere
would set off a wave of angry recriminations. How did the offending
nation secure the fuel for the bomb? Who helped with the technology?

It is terra incognita for which we have no maps, but we can be sure
that once some nation breaks the implicit taboo against using nuclear
bombs in anger — or we or the Soviets fire off even so much as a small
tactical nuclear weapon in some far-off corner of the earth — the world
will never be the same again. As we Americans know from our own lunatic
inability to control the gun traffic at home, fright does not conduce to
rational action, particularly when there are strong, bigoted vested inter-
ests determined to exploit it.

Our Dubious Future

If we fail to gain control over the nuclear arms race and check the
spread of nuclear weapons into irresponsible hands — if we do not some-

480 The Private Sector

how break and reverse the processes of escalation and proliferation now
relentlessly at work — I doubt that we shall avoid a nuclear exchange that
could menace Western civilization. Even if we do attain those objectives,
other massive changes may fundamentally alter power relations to the
detriment of Western influence and Western ideals.

Our Alienation from Europe

Whatever the future, I see a fragmenting of the mold that has pre-
vailed for the last four decades, through changes not only in the West
but also in the Soviet Union. Over many years, we sought to develop
some common understanding with the nations of Western Europe; we
tried to comprehend their problems and to seek their counsel in the
shaping of common policies; but now we seem increasingly insensitive
to their interests or concerns. We fail even to recognize fundamental
differences in our national situations and requirements.

The Carter Administration disenchanted Europeans by failing to
maintain a constant line of policy. President Reagan and his colleagues
are endangering Atlantic relations by mistakenly diagnosing our recip-
rocal concerns. Our authority is not waning in Europe because Europe-
ans have lost faith that we can effectively defend them but because they
have lost confidence in our judgement, constancy and comprehension.
They find our obsessive hectoring of Moscow not merely f utile but dan-
gerous and are disturbed that the current American government seems
to view all problems as part of the East-West struggle, appears incapable
of seeing East-West relations in other than military terms, and shows
little if any sensitivity to their predicament.

That predicament is, of course, largely of their own making. I have
described in earlier chapters the efforts to build an effective partnership
among the Western industrialized nations. One of our most compelling
objectives was to tie the German people tightly to the West. Unfortu-
nately, the momentum toward unity and the building of effective insti-
tutions was halted too soon; today, a new generation of West Germans,
lacking the experience of the World War and poorly instructed in either
Soviet intentions or their own history, shows premonitory symptoms of
disaffection. That disaffection may well get out of hand if we do not
show more appreciation of Germany’s special problems.

Though detente means for most Americans little more than increased
civility in East-West discourse and less abrasive relations with Moscow,
the Germans regard some measure of understanding with Moscow —
some form of detente (or their version of it, Ostpolitik ) — not as a luxury
but as an operating necessity. Only by maintaining a dialogue with East-
ern Europe can they achieve the repatriation of families from German
territories incorporated in Poland by the Potsdam Treaty or mitigate the

Over and Out 481

heartbreak resulting from the separation of friends and families in the
two parts of a severed country. The Germans are repelled by the pros-
pect of resuming the Cold War with poisonous fishwife squabbling sub-
stituted for a serious East-West dialogue. And that mood is more than
shared by the smaller nations of Western Europe — particularly the
countries of Scandinavia and Benelux.

I find little basis for optimism in observing Europe today. Too many
Europeans are denying the existence of Europe even as a hope and goal
and are blaming America for their own failures of will and enterprise.
As nationalism reasserts itself, each country is increasingly tempted to
go its own way. Washington, by conditioned reflex, misconceives and
resents European doubts and hesitations. The Atlantic family is not a
happy one.

Meanwhile, Europe has suffered badly from the abruptly rising oil
costs and its precarious dependence on the Middle East as its principal
source of energy. Initially content to let America carry the responsiblity
for trying to quiet Middle East turbulence, Europeans have increasingly
lost confidence in our will and ability as they watch our politicians respond
more to the interests and ambitions of the Israeli government than to
the United States’ own interests and responsibilities. Europeans thus feel
helpless and uneasy. They lack the political clout to launch effective peace
initiatives of their own. Those they have tried to launch have been
rebuffed by Washington.

All this is a menace to Western unity. I can think of nothing more
divisive than a prolonged interruption of the oil flow from the Gulf. If
it resulted from a political act of a key Arab oil-producing country, it
would — quite possibly with reason — be blamed on America’s biased
diplomacy. If, on the other hand, European nations should ever see a
threat to their oil supplies from an increase in Soviet influence in the
Gulf area, some would be tempted to seek accommodation with Moscow.

The Changing Soviet Union

Our government has recently reverted to dealing with Moscow much
as it did when John Foster Dulles regarded the Soviet Union as the
antichrist, a demonic power seeking world domination for its secular
religion. Today that view is grotesquely out of date. Moscow is no longer
the central force of an evangelical world-wide movement; the gas has
largely escaped from its ideological balloon. For the ordinary Soviet cit-
izen, the Communist god is far deader than is the Christian one; ideo-
logical passion has given way to exhaustion, to the instinct to survive as
best one can under an inhumane system. The result is cynicism border-
ing on despair. What is Communism in the Soviet Union today? It is
party control and repression, while the hierarchical levels of advantage

482 The Private Sector

and privilege among the apparatchiks make a mockery of the Marxist
faith.

These facts should help shape our dealings with Moscow. If the USSR
has become merely a variant of the crude, thrusting nation we knew
under the Czars, history should instruct us how to cope with it. More-
over, we should be able to deal with Moscow unhampered by doctrinal
passions and rigidities that, from the beginning of time, have produced
hatred and bloodshed and are at least a contributing cause of almost all
of the world’s current wars.*

If Soviet policy is freed from the rigidifying factor of a dogmatic
creed that permits no compromise, practical politics (in other words,
Realpolitik diplomacy) can substitute for passion, while hard-nosed con-
siderations of reciprocal advantage can play a larger role in settling affairs
with an adversary primarily motivated by mundane impulses that lack
mystical underpinning — greed, jealousy, ambition, and revenge.

The fading of ideology is reflected in the progressive atrophy of
Moscow’s world network. Communist parties around the world no longer
look to Moscow as the infallible font of dogma and authority; even in
some of the older Communist parties of Western Europe there are vary-
ing degrees of restlessness. Finally, can anyone regard the Communist
party in the United States as more than a Chaplinesque parody of its
sinister archetype?

Even the young leaders of emerging Third World nations are no
longer attracted to Communism by its doctrine so much as by its offer
of a centralized system that legitimates their efforts to maintain tight
central control over their new nations. Guns and tanks can often be
obtained from a Soviet Union that has a vested interest in instability,
while a genuflection to Marx still passes in the Third World lexicon as a
gesture of anticolonialism. Because most Third World leaders identify
colonialism with racial exploitation, they fail to recognize that the Soviet’s
Eastern European bloc is the one great surviving colonial empire.

Perhaps we could help clarify understanding by modernizing our
vocabulary. To refer to the Soviet Union as a “Communist power” is
wildly inaccurate. Even the Kremlin’s leaders do not pretend that they
have established a Communist state — that is merely their promise of cav-
iar in the sky. They claim only that they have built a socialist half-way
house toward a Communist society, and, since the road beyond does not
exist even as a droshky track, they no longer seriously pretend that Com-

*One need mention only a few bloody conflicts in which religion is at least a major
contributing element: the endless and pointless struggle in Northern Ireland; the dreary
Arab-Israeli conflict; the continuing dispute between the Christian Greeks and the Muslim
Turks in Cyprus; the Sunni Kurds against the Shiite Iranians; the argument between the
Orthodox Ethiopians and the Muslim Somalis; the quarrel between the Christians and
Muslims in Lebanon; the revolutionary violence in Iran; the communal massacres in the
Asian subcontinent; and the Muslim insurgency in Mindanao in the Philippines.

Over and Out 483

munism is attainable or that they are striving to attain it. Thus, in my
view, we err by speaking of the Soviet Union as a “Communist power”;
not only is it wrong in substance but it attributes to the Soviet leaders a
nonexistent idealism that, for the gullible, gives them a bogus respecta-
bility.

Rather than being a Communist power, the Soviet Union is a nation
that by history and geographical accident fell on the Byzantine side of
the cultural divide that separates it from Central and Western Europe,
and it behaves very much as did the Czarist regimes that preceded it.
But the influence of Byzantium has shaped it far less than the residue of
genes, culture, and politics left behind by the Mongol invaders of the
thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Dostoyevsky observed: “Scratch a Rus-
sian and you’ll find a Tartar,” and Rosa Luxemburg noted that the early
Bolsheviks were specially feared for their “Tartar-Mongolian savagery.”
The Stalin Terror, of which the current Soviet leaders are survivors,
operated as a kind of frightful, forced, unnatural selection that pre-
served and emphasized those qualities the Mongols left behind: cruelty,
expansionism, blind obedience, an avidity for propaganda, a pathologi-
cal secrecy reinforced by an insidious spy system, deviousness, intrigue,
and intolerant chauvinism. Thus it is hardly surprising that the present
Soviet regime behaves as did the Muscovite empire that preceded it 2 —
boorish in its habits and manner, expansionist in its hegemonic ambi-
tions and repressive in its methods.

Threats to the Soviet Structure

Today that crude despotism faces critical problems. Controlled by an
aging hierarchy, it is about to change the guard under a system incapa-
ble of assuring a succession without a power fight. Meanwhile, recent
years have added further piles of evidence to confirm the lesson taught
by six decades of frustration and disappointment that the Soviet eco-
nomic system does not — and cannot — work efficiently. Operating a com-
plex economy in conformity with a central plan produces a poor
distribution of resources; production is constantly getting out of phase
with what the country needs. It also produces shoddy goods. In fact —
and this implicitly validates the advantages of the market system — the
Soviets’ most widely heralded production achievement is military hard-
ware, primarily because the military constitute the only consumers with
the power to reject or return inferior merchandise — or, in other words,
the only effective market force in the whole Soviet system.

Besides the fading of ideology, which weakens the thrust of their
expansionist drive, the Soviets face a major threat from those most insid-
ious instruments of social and political change: demography and ethnic-
ity. Ethnic Russians now comprise no more than 50 percent of the

484 The Private Sector

population of the USSR, while non-Russians are multiplying far more
rapidly — especially the 40 million Muslims of Central Asia, whose rate
of annual increase is several times that of the Russians. Such shifts in
demography complicate the Kremlin’s efforts to keep a strong hand on
the fourteen non-Russian Soviet republics, with eighty distinct languages
and two hundred dialects. To discourage dissension, the government
has moved about one-sixth of the total Russian population (roughly 22
million in 1970) into the non-Soviet republics and transplanted a similar
proportion of Moldavians and Ukrainians from their own republics into
others. 3

Czarist Russia used the slogan “For the Czar and the Orthodox faith”
to justify its occupation of parts of the Ukraine and Byelorussia and to
make non-Russians fight other neighbors. After the 1917 revolution, the
USSR substituted the spreading of Communism for religion to sanctify
its imperialist designs, while Marxist-Leninist doctrine denied the signif-
icance of national boundaries. Now with the fading appeal of that doc-
trine, ideology no longer serves as a binding agent to prevent the curdling
of this bouillabaisse of diverse races, cultures, and histories. Instead, the
Kremlin is increasingly forced back on nationalism, and since national-
ism automatically incites counter-nationalisms, we can expect more and
more incidents of nationalist resistance and disaffection throughout the
vast reaches of the USSR — to be put down by a mass army that is itself
having problems with its ethnic and nationalist elements.

If that phenomenon poses a long-range threat to the integrity of the
Soviet Union, the menace is even greater in its Eastern European empire,
where similar resentments are seething. With Moscow losing authority
as the Vatican for an international ideology and depending once more
on a chauvinistic love for “Mother Russia,” such discontent can only
increase. In Poland today, even the party hierarchs can no longer con-
ceal their loss of faith while only the threat of the Red Army protects the
party structure from that infectious virus — the yearning for individual
freedom.

The Significance of the Soviet Union in Trouble

We instinctively applaud news that the Soviets are in trouble; our
hearts lift when we watch the increasing restlessness of Poland or other
Eastern European members of the Bloc. No one dedicated to freedom
and democracy can do other than wish ill of a system that subjects mil-
lions of unwilling human beings to an Orwellian tyranny. So we listen
wishfully to courageous Soviet dissidents who tell us that the Soviet empire
must sooner or later break up, or at least change drastically; that is the
fate of despotisms throughout history. Yet we know that the process of
dissolution can be interrupted and retarded by the machinery of repres-

Over and Out 485

sion — Moscow’s vast military force and ubiquitous secret police. We know
also from Soviet conduct in Afghanistan that, if the Kremlin encounters
serious trouble with its nationalist or ethnic minorities in Central Asia, it
will show little squeamishness in its manner of reacting. Finally, we have
learned from repeated experience that a nation cannot cruelly repress
its own population without hardening the line of its foreign policy. Not
only will the USSR ferociously put down dissension within its own bor-
ders but it will deal equally brutally with any serious threat to the integ-
rity of the Warsaw Pact.

If disintegration ultimately occurs, it is thus unlikely to happen for
many years. Still, looking ahead, we must be prepared for the disruption
it could produce. The breaking up of the Soviet system could, among
other things, force hazardous readjustments in the precarious balance
of power by which world equilibrium is now maintained, and it could
entail the clash of powerful forces. Threatened on the East by what I
once heard General de Gaulle refer to as “the huge dustheap of peoples
in China,” the Soviets must feel a desperate need to use their domination
of Central Europe as a glacis discouraging Western attack. If the Krem-
lin felt key bloc countries slipping their harness, it might well be driven
to strike out blindly to the point of a dangerous collision.

Ending of the Superpower Systems

If I have learned anything from years of observing and sometimes
participating in world affairs, it is that one should not assume the per-
manence of even those situations that appear most solid. Not only are
America’s ties with Europe beginning to weaken but future generations,
including perhaps our own children or grandchildren, may someday
witness the disintegration of both the Soviet and American world sys-
tems. What new coalescings and coalitions may then emerge are beyond
imagination. For a while, the world might presumably remain broken
up among regional groupings, but sooner or later one could expect the
emergence of some new superpower system or systems in which China
might play a significant part.

Europeans feel far more at home with speculations of this kind than
do Americans. For a thousand years they have known destructive wars
two or three times a century. They are accustomed to realignments among
nations, the shifting of allegiances, and the reversal of alliances. They
do not view the current world system as in any sense divinely ordained;
nor, unlike some optimistic Americans, do they assume that the advent
of nuclear weapons has meant the end of wars. Their major concern is
to avoid having their countries serve as the arena for a conflict between
the superpowers. As many Europeans told me after the German collapse
in 1945: “We can never afford to be liberated again.”

486 The Private Sector
The North-South Problem

During the Kennedy Administration, many of my colleagues turned
away from Dulles’s compulsive concentration on the East-West struggle,
in the belief that the central problem of our time was America’s relations
with what became romantically labeled the Third World. Though, as I
have described in chapter 12, I thought that they overestimated our
capacity to work miracles of instant development, the Administration’s
demonstration of generous concern did America honor.

Today, the pendulum has swung full cycle; the ever-widening dis-
parity in wealth and income between the Northern and Southern Hemi-
spheres is now regarded as a nuisance rather than a challenge, and we
Americans think about it as little as possible. More than half of our eco-
nomic and military aid goes to Israel and Egypt, leaving little for the rest
of the world. As the head of an American delegation to an OECD meet-
ing in 1962, I took the lead in persuading the Western democracies to
set a goal of committing at least 1 percent of their gross national prod-
ucts to foreign economic aid; today, our own contribution is only one-
fifth of 1 percent, which puts us fifteenth on the list of Western countries
just below Finland. Our foreign aid, small as it is, has become largely a
selective instrument for political coercion. We are tarnishing our lead-
ership and the integrity of our promises by failing even to meet our
share of contributions to multilateral aid institutions.

President Reagan’s attitude might best be represented by a cartoon
of the Thomas Nash genre showing a bloated billionaire descending from
his limousine to tell a group of ragged urchins: “Why don’t you do as I
did, utilize the free market and you’ll all be rich.’’ But that it is a cruel
joke. Our country did not escape Third World poverty solely because of
its democratic virtues and its reliance on free enterprise and a free mar-
ket; our forebears acquired the greatest area of arable land in the world,
with a temperate climate and an unparalleled abundance of raw mate-
rials — land that had not been drained of its nutriment by a thousand
years of primitive cultivation, ruined by erosion, or repeatedly ravaged
by predatory neighbors. To ignore those facts is both arrogant and fat-
uous and I can think of no approach better designed to make the Third
World despise us.

It distresses me that, for many Americans — particularly those igno-
rant of history — the disappointments of recent years have discouraged
idealism. Instead of looking for new wrongs to right, new injustices to
rectify, new miseries to eradicate, we have become self-centered and
preoccupied with our own real or imagined troubles, concentrating on
transient problems to the neglect of the future. We have turned inwards
in part because we no longer feel uniquely endowed with wealth and
resources; peoples in other nations have now joined that exclusive club,

Over and Out 487

and are equalling or surpassing our standard of living. In addition, many
have become convinced that our foreign aid has failed to achieve the
transformations envisaged by our excessive expectations. Nations in which
we have invested the most — such as India, Pakistan, and Indonesia — are
still cursed with poverty and seem likely to remain so. Moreover, many
of the poor nations are — in spite of anything we might do — doomed to
fight a losing battle against demography, for a country with a high pop-
ulation growth rate is like Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill. In spite of
all the brave talk of flattening demographic curves, the hope that indus-
trialization would reduce birth rates, and the efforts made to promote
family planning, there is little basis for encouragement in many coun-
tries. India’s population, for example, is still growing at the rate of 2.4
percent a year and that impoverished country will, by the turn of the
century (less than two decades away), have a billion mouths to feed.

So far, most discussions of demography have focused largely on
aggregates. Will the expanding world population exceed the availability
of resources? How can we cope with the resulting political tensions when
the population of many poor countries is increasing too fast to sustain
standards of living even at present meager levels, while the population
of the rich countries steadily declines? These problems are real enough,
yet we should not concentrate narrowly on aggregate numbers but also
observe the effect of high growth rates on a nation’s population profile.
When population grows at a rapid rate — 2 or 3 percent a year — the
median age moves progressively lower; in many underdeveloped nations,
an increasing part of the population is under the age of twenty. At the
same time, in many industrialized countries, where population growth
scarcely exceeds the replacement level, the median age is steadily mov-
ing toward the upper end of the scale.

This persistently widening disparity in median ages will further com-
plicate North-South understanding. Already, Third World delegates to
international meetings are for the most part young and impatient, while
spokesmen for the advanced countries are middle-aged and cautious.
We are reproducing on a world scale the problem of understanding and
accommodation across the wide chasm of the generation gap. It is a wor-
risome problem today; tomorrow it will be worse.

I he lowering of the median age penalizes a poor country by increas-
ing the percentage of its population in a nonproductive sector. In the
past, an individual of productive age might have to support four others
either too young or too old to work; now, in many countries he may
have to support eight. 1 here is no way most Third World economies can
provide employment for a swelling wave of new entrants into the labor
force. The United States cannot ignore the problem; we are on the front
line. On the islands and the large continent south of our border are
several Third World countries in which demographic pressures are

488 The Private Sector

building toward the point of explosion. The population of the United
States today is 226 million, and growing at only seven-tenths of 1 percent
a year; within nineteen years, the population of Latin America — where
some countries have an annual growth rate of 3 percent or more — will
aggregate more than 600 million. In Latin America as a whole, 60 per-
cent of the population is under the age of twenty-five, while for Brazil
and Mexico the figure is 65 percent.

With the population of Mexico still increasing at an estimated rate of
2.9 percent a year (which is an improvement over the 3.6 percent that
prevailed until recently), 45 percent of the population is under the age
of fifteen: the time at which youths normally try to enter the labor force.
Yet even oil-rich Mexico cannot possibly create new jobs fast enough to
accommodate more than a fraction of the swelling tide of young poten-
tial workers. (Last year 800,000 were looking for jobs with only 300,000
jobs available.) What will happen to this growing freshet of young men
and women in the years ahead? Tiny agricultural plots cannot be subdi-
vided below a minimum economic size, so the sons and daughters of
small farmers must migrate to urban centers. Mexico City today, with a
metropolitan area population estimated at 15 million, is on the way to
becoming the largest city in the world. 4 But there the young find only
heartbreak: no jobs, no housing, no place in an overcrowded society.
What are their options? They can either join gangs outside the law (ter-
rorist activities are already dangerously increasing) or try to gain entry
to neighboring countries — which means overwhelmingly the United
States.

We have seen only the first ripples of what is destined to become a
tidal wave as intractable demography and the resulting lack of employ-
ment drive more and more Latin American young men and women to
try to enter our country by any means possible.

Few have bothered to ponder the basic philosophical issue, which has
more than one aspect. When the United States or any other nation makes
a tacit social decision to stabilize its population while its neighbors —
influenced by ignorance or custom or church — maintain a population
growth it cannot accommodate, should we let our neighbors’ social
decision undercut and frustrate our own? The problem is not unlike that
posed by other ecological phenomena such as acid rain, which floats on
the wind without regard to national boundaries; yet, since it directly
involves the fate and future of thousands of human beings, the issues
are far more complex. How then do we determine the proper trade-offs
between humanitarian considerations and the cold-blooded obligation
of every society to protect its own integrity; between generosity and the
sovereign right of every nation to design its own social policies; and
between the need to keep track of illegal entrants and our commitment
to individual freedom and privacy? In spite of the protests of zealous
libertarians, we shall ultimately have to adopt some system of identity

Over and Out 489

cards — and probably even fingerprinting. We can no longer afford the
privilege of anonymity that was appropriate when Americans were con-
quering the empty lands beyond our wide frontier. Other civilized states
have managed to live with such devices without compromising their lib-
erties, and though it may inconvenience philanderers we shall have to
come to it. We can no longer avoid such eccentricities any more than we
can afford to make handguns available to every moron.

Apart from the question of illegal immigrants, I can foresee formi-
dable social and economic problems resulting from the increasing polit-
ical influence of Hispanic-Americans. In twenty years, they will become
a larger ethnic minority than blacks — even though blacks are increasing
so much faster than whites that, during the decade from 1970 to 1980,
the percentage of white Americans in our population fell by 4.3 percent.

1 o mitigate the potential threat to the integrity of our political sys-
tem, we should concentrate on helping and encouraging all immigrants
to adapt quickly to the mores and customs of America or they will be
forced into ethnic enclaves and become an indigestible lump in the
American body politic. It seems to me mischievous, therefore, when a
curious cabal of sociologists, social workers, psychologists, and language
teachers encourages immigrants to preserve their culture and language
out of a sentimental concern for “roots.” The world has provided count-
less examples of the political fissions and irreconcilable conflicts suffered
by bilingual societies; the Biblical tale of the Tower of Babel should be
required reading for all statesmen.

The disruptive effect of increasingly powerful ethnic lobbies is not
limited to domestic affairs. It threatens to hobble America’s ability to
design and administer an effective foreign policy. Already, the Israeli
lobby disables us from conducting a policy toward the Middle East that
advances and protects the larger interests of America and the other
Western democracies; the increasing political self-consciousness of the
black lobby may in time impair our ability to design a balanced and
rational African policy; the Greek lobby has already prejudiced our
relations with I urkey; while what remains of an Irish lobby creates at
least some slight problems in our relations with Britain. The emergence
of an increasingly powerful, well-organized Hispanic lobby could gravely
complicate our already formidable problems in dealing with the nations
of Latin America. We would gravely exacerbate the problem were we
ever to commit the egregious folly of admitting Puerto Rico as the fifty-
first state.

The Ordeal of Modernity

I cannot be happy with the untidiness and turmoil on the current
scene, the weakening of faith in our institutions, and our anemic sense
of community and common purpose. Perhaps I have lived too long, but,

490 The Private Sector

as I see it, the moral absolutes have disintegrated; cheating is too often
accepted as the norm, and brutish criminals are no longer regarded pri-
marily as a menace against which society must protect itself but as inno-
cent victims of social unfairness. Moreover, we have lost our elan; no
longer do we display the ebullience and resilience of a nation and a peo-
ple confident of their own destiny — or even their desired destination.
What, then, has happened?

I have pondered these questions without finding simple answers and
lately I have assigned a larger role to the fading of religious conviction
in many American milieus; for, in spite of the vociferous assertions of
the Moral Majority, religion does not today hold the place it once did in
American life. An early convert to agnosticism, in spite of a Methodist
upbringing, I have all the serenity I need; yet I am still puzzled by a
perplexing question; Can a nation bemused by the glitter and mystery
of modern technology maintain its inner strength without some form of
belief in a benign external force or presence? Can it achieve a sufficient
sense of community and common purpose to provide a stable and satis-
fying environment for its people? Can it at the same time (and this ques-
tion specifically concerns America) carry a burden of world leadership
not obviously and directly related to its own security?

The answer depends in large part on how effectively people adjust
to a secular environment. There is, it seems to me, ample evidence that
an increasing number of Americans share Matthew Arnold’s discourage-
ment at the loss of “certitude” and feel a sense of being “on a darkling
plain . . . swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight .” 5 For most
people, the loss of “certitude” is an irrevocable disaster, since without an
abiding faith as an essential simplifier, life may be too complex and puz-
zling for most individuals (or even nations) to cope with. When men and
women ask the giraffe question “Why?” of life’s eternal mysteries and
hear no easy, definitive answer, many sublimate their desire for “certi-
tude” by escapist flights into bizarre, exotic, mystical cults, no matter how
palpably fraudulent. Others indulge a furtive preoccupation with self
for which psychoanalysts provide the confessional. If Marx called reli-
gion the opium of the German people, drugs are now the religion of
many Americans. Only the sturdy or insensitive can accept life’s inscrut-
ability with philosophical aplomb.

Along with the fading of religious faith has come a drastic change in
social mares — the elimination of restraints on sexual expression, the
legitimization of gambling, the elevation of pornography to a folk art,
the preoccupation with psychiatry (we are like monkeys picking the lice
from each other’s heads) — all that bespeaks a people with little belief in
their own institutions or in the commonweal as a compelling abstraction.

Though we usually defend this disdain for institutions in the name
of freedom, we have substituted a whole new set of taboos. Even though

Over and Out 491

no society can f unction effectively without respect for excellence, “elite,”
despite its spelling, is now regarded as a four-letter word. Educational
standards are manipulated and degraded to conform to rigid sociologi-
cal preconceptions. We have strayed so far from our fundamental
national principles as to substitute equality of condition for equality of
opportunity as a central social objective. Our painting and poetry are in
bondage to the iron tyranny of unintelligibility and have lost their mean-
ing for most Americans. (Who can quote any recent poet other than
Eliot or occasionally Auden?) Our literature is preoccupied with the gro-
tesque, and we bowdlerize it not to expunge sex or violence but to con-
form it to a whole new set of social strictures, largely reflecting real or
contrived ethnic sensitivities; indeed, we have a new index librorum pro-
hibitorum, which includes such a curious potpourri as Uncle Tom's Cabin ,
B'rer Rabbit , and The Merchant of Venice.

Finally, as one who has always enjoyed the consistent help and sup-
port of a close and mutually affectionate family, I am most concerned
by the transformation — perhaps even breakdown — of that nuclear insti-
tution. Throughout Western history, the family has provided the mech-
anism for the perpetuation of the race and, though the process has shown
tolerance for a large element of chance, it has worked reasonably well.
But, if society comes to depend merely on brief and casual matings with-
out the traditional family responsibilities, we shall encounter serious
trouble.

The New Vistas

I have few answers to the perplexing issues raised here. I am not
even sure about the questions. Yet, as history has repeatedly shown,
prophesy is rarely profitable; anyone who speculates about the future
will almost certainly be proved wrong. “History,” Paul Valery once wrote,
“is the science of what never happens twice”; and when I am in a somber
mood I recall those cautionary words of Ralph Hodgson’s that “the
handwriting on the wall may be a forgery” — or, to put it in a contempo-
rary idiom, it may turn out to be mere graffitti.

What most sharply marks the sad chronicle of the past two decades
is the number of opportunities lost, the number of mistakes and miscal-
culations made — even by the most sophisticated nations and their lead-
ers. Perhaps we have simply been enduring a protracted run of bad luck,
with the statistical probability that we should do better in the decades we
are now approaching.

If these observations read like the disgruntled grumblings of an old
curmudgeon, I see no basis for despair or resignation; that proves noth-
ing and helps nothing. Jean Monnet taught me that a reasoned optimism
is the only acceptable working hypothesis for self-respecting men and

492 The Private Sector

women. Mankind has muddled through for centuries, and we have a
certain facility for it. Quite likely we shall find the ways and means to
continue that performance.

Certainly there is much I find exciting in present-day society and
particularly the vistas opened by the new findings of science. Through
the space program we have caught glimpses of an infinitely expanded
universe and that should go far to cure our claustrophobia; we are lit-
erally reaching for the stars. The advancing frontiers of biological sci-
ence reveal fascinating potentials for life on this planet. If I regret, as I
do, not to have fifty years more to live, it is in part because I would like
to know what the biologists will discover as they progressively peel the
veil from a world still trying to hide its secrets. At the same time, I can
easily foresee that the collision between the incessant probing of some
individuals and the primordial fears of others may create an intellectual
crisis beyond any we have known since the Inquisition.

The old myths reflected such fears. Aeneas, Virgil suggests, would
never have suffered the hazards of the high seas had man not discovered
the art of navigation. Daedalus defied gravity by inventing wings, with
which his son, Icarus, flew too near the sun and was destroyed. When
overly curious Pandora opened her seductive box, she released all of the
world’s evils. And in Hebrew myth, Adam’s punishment for sampling
the Tree of Knowledge was banishment from Eden. In the classical credo,
fate kept mankind in its place; to expect earthly improvement was to
rattle the bars separating the human from the divine. In the Middle
Ages, the Church justified its opposition to scientific inquiry by the cruel
assertion that original sin had destroyed all hope for man’s moral
improvement. Satanic curiosity might, the ecclesiastics felt, drive men to
develop theories about the material world and even the universe that
would challenge the Church’s rigid doctrine and undercut its authority,
hence its integrity as an institution. So the Inquisition burned Giordano
Bruno and would have burned Galileo had he not recanted, while it
frightened Descartes into suppressing his Traite du Monde until after his
death. Only the activities of a handful of dedicated men, passionately
concerned with the advancement of truth and confident of their exper-
iments and observations, prevented a total strangulation of the effort to
penetrate nature’s secrets. Instead, with a courage comparable to that of
today’s Soviet dissidents, brave men of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries defied both church and state in their quest for truth.

And now, once more, we hear talk of restrictions on research that
echo the language of the old fears. How far should man go in his explo-
ration of nature even though it may upset established dogmas? How far
should he be permitted to venture into areas with unknowable implica-
tions? Should Galileo have been required to supply the bureaucracy of
the Inquisition with an intellectual impact statement before proceeding

Over and Out 493

with his studies? I should like to live long enough to see the new revela-
tions of biology and, whenever the issue is clearly joined, to raise my
voice on the side of free inquiry.

For all our current problems and anxieties, I find it a good time to
be alive — a time of stimulation and challenge — and I would not have
chosen any other period in which to live out my days. For seven decades,
I have had the chance not only to witness the world in convulsion, but
to speculate on a future well beyond my own life span.

All during my mature years, I have disciplined myself not to look
back and, above all, not to let myself be disabled by remorse at my errors
of omission and commission, which have been legion. But memoirs are,
by definition, an essay in retrospection, and now, nearing the end of the
last chapter, I find I have enjoyed writing them.

Looking ahead, however, is far more exhilarating. At an early age, I
wrote off as insoluble the ultimate issues of why, by what external force
or spirit, and for what purpose, I was permitted to materialize at this
moment in history. Since philosophers and theologians are merely human
beings with human brains, working within the same constraints, I early
decided that they could find no more answers than I, so I stopped read-
ing them. When I contemplate the future, I, therefore, limit my line of
vision to what man can comprehend and do.

A Good Time to Live

That darkly prescient British diplomat Lord Vansittart, whom I have
mentioned before, wrote a volume of memoirs called The Mist Procession .
The title referred to a dream in which he had seen a long file of men
and women he had known walking slowly down a road shrouded in mist
then passing briefly through an open space pierced by a shaft of light.
“Emerging from one obscurity,” he wrote, “they passed into another.”
Vansittart’s vision has haunted me for years as I have recalled some men
and women I have valued greatly during a long life. Many of them have
died — some long ago — yet I still recall with warmth and gratitude their
legacy of assistance, affection, and wisdom. Their friendship was a treas-
ure beyond price.

CODA

It is the thought of those friendships that has given me most pleasure
in writing this book. Now, as I finish it, I feel a little like Tennyson’s old
Ulysses:

Much have I seen and known: cities of men,

And manners, climates, councils, governments.

And, I need hardly add:

I am a part of all that I have met.

494 The Private Sector

Though seven decades are a miniscule moment in the epic sweep of
the human saga, the increasing compression of events now means that
by medieval standards I have lived at least five centuries. Meanwhile, as
the centrifuge of change whirls ever faster, stale cakes of custom crum-
ble and fly violently apart. All this has meant for me a wonderfully for-
tunate life, even though I may not, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
hoped to do, leave many “fragments of my fleece on the hedges.” But I
have enjoyed almost every bit of it. I have been nourished by the affec-
tion of my friends and stimulated by the vitriol of my enemies. And I
have been sustained by extraordinarily rich family relations: my father,
who taught me what he learned not only from books but from experi-
ence, and my mother, strictly committed to her own high standards, who
was still unfailingly kind and forgiving. In my own generation, I have
been equally favored by my brother Stuart, who, sharing many of my
interests, has been a constant source of encouragement, while my two
sons, John and Douglas, have counseled and advised me and given me
great comfort. Most of all, I was profoundly lucky to meet Ruth Mur-
doch in Paris fifty-three years ago. (It was worth going to jail for, as I
have recounted in chapter 1.) We have lived together for almost half a
century, and without her affectionate support I would have done far
fewer things, done them less well, and life would have lacked much of
its savor. Though in this book I have overused the first person singular,
it has been an editorial “I”; what I claim to have done, we have done
together.

What more could man want than that? I feel no sense of imminent
mortality, yet, one by one, my friends are disappearing. Though I have
excellent health and expect to go on presuming on my friends and
annoying my enemies for at least another decade, I shall end this book
of memoirs with some lines by a British civil servant, Humbert Wolfe,
whose verses I read and admired in my days of adolescence.

The high song is over. Even the echoes fail now;

Winners and losers — they are only a theme now,

Their victory and defeat a half-forgotten tale now;

And even the angels are only a dream now.

There is no need for blame, no cause for praise now.

Nothing to hide, to change or to discover.

They were men and women. They have gone their ways now.

As men and women must. The high song is over . 6

Notes

1 . The First Eighteen Years Are the Easiest

1. Quoted by Paul Goodman and Frank O. Gatell, America in the Twenties: The
Beginnings of Contemporary America (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
Inc., 1972), p. 146.

2. Paul Valery, Oeuvres (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1957), vol. I, p. 988.

2 . From Depression to War , Ploughs , and “Habbakuks”

1. Dean Acheson, Morning and Noon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965), 2nd
prtg., p. 192.

2. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Politics of Upheaval (Bos-
ton: Houghton Mifflin Co., i960), pp. 505-509.

3. George Gamov, not only a brilliant scientist but also a man of wit and whimsy,
later wrote several books to explain physics to the layman — Atomic Energy in
Cosmic and Eluman Life, One , Two Three . . . Infinity, A Star Called the Sun, Thirty
Years that Shook Physics and the Mr. Tompkins series, to name a few. Denied a
f ull role in the atomic energy program because of his Russian origin, he taught
for many years at George Washington University and died in 1968. I spent
an evening at his house in Washington once after a trip; although we always
planned to resume our acquaintance, we never got around to it in the turmoil
of war time. Whatever happened to Professor Meissner, I do not know.
I hroughout the trip he was extremely apprehensive. He was forbidden to
teach at the University of Frankfurt, and when I took a picture of him at a
party in our stateroom, he begged me not to send him a print, since that could
get him into further trouble. I asked about him when I was in Frankfurt at
the end of the war but could discover nothing.

4. In the Book of Habakkuk, chapter 1, verse 5, the Lord refers to a “work
which you will not believe, though it be told to you.’’ The spelling error orig-
inated, according to Lampe, with Pyke’s Canadian secretary. David Lampe,
Pyke: The Unknown Genius (London: Evans Brothers Ltd., 1959), P- 128.

5. Ibid., p. 145.

3 . Lend-Lease and the Avoidance of War Debts

1 . Richard N. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy: The Origins and the Prospects of
Our International Economic Order (New York: McGraw Hill, iq6q), expanded
edition, p. 55.

2. Eugene Staley, “The Economic Implications of Lend-Lease,” American Eco-
nomic Review, vol. 33, no. 1, pt. 2, suppl. (March 1943), p. 367.

49 6 Notes (pages 33-77)

3. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences oj the Peace (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), pp. 279-80.

4. Press Conferences, vol. 22, September 7, 1943 ’ PP- 85-86.

5. Eugene Staley, op. cit., p. 369.

6. Richard N. Gardner, op. cit, pp. 171-72.

7. Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace & War
(New York: Harper Bros., 1948), p. 188.

4 . The Bombing Survey

1. David Maclsaac, The United States Strategic Bombing in World War Two (New
York: Garland Publ., 1976), vol. 3, exhibit 29.

2. Solly Zuckerman, “Paris in a Railway Desert,” From Apes to Warlords: The
Autobiography (1904-1946) of Solly Zuckerman (London: Hamish Hamilton,
1978), pp. 286-305.

3. George W. Ball, “With AES in War and Politics,” Edward P. Doyle, ed., As We
Knew Adlai: The Stevenson Story by Twenty-two Friends (New York: Harper &
Row, 1966), p. 142.

5 . Albert Speer on a Grade-B Movie Set

1 . Four copies of the will were sent out of the bunker. Bormann carried one but
was shot before he could leave Berlin. The other copies were carried by Major
Willi Johannmeier, Hitler’s army adjutant; Wilhelm Zander, Bormann s per-
sonal adviser; and Heinz Lorenz, an official of the Propaganda Ministry. The
pilot of a seaplane sent by Doenitz to rescue them on the Havel River pan-
icked under Russian shelling and took off before they could board. By the
time the three men reached the western sector, the war was over. Colonel
Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, also left the bunker with a
postscript to the will written by Hitler to be delivered to Wilhelm Keitel, but
burned it during his escape. H. R. Trevor-Roper, Last Days of Hitler (New
York: The Macmillan Company, 1962), pp. 246-49, 278-80.

2. Walter Laqueur, “Hitler’s Holocaust,” Encounter, vol. 55, no. 1 (July 1980),
pp. 6-25.

3. Malraux said in his Musee Imaginaire, “The art which is taking over, sorting
out and imposing its metamorphosis on this vast legacy of the past is by no
means easy to define. It is our art of today — and obviously a fish is badly
placed forjudging what the aquarium looks like from outside. Andre Mal-
raux, The Voices of Silence, Stuart Gilbert, trans. (Garden City: Doubleday 8c
Company, Inc., 1953), p. 70.

4. The loss of Slavs is estimated to be: about 5.5 million Ukrainians (including
2.5 million POWs); 3 million Poles (including about 0.5 million in combat
losses); 2 million Byelorussians (including about 0.5 million POWs). Bohdan
Wytwycky, The Other Holocaust: Many Circles of Hell (Washington: The Novak
Report, 1980).

5. H. R. Trevor-Roper, op. cit., p. 302.

6 . Jean Monnet

1. W. K. Hancock and M. M. Gowing, British War Economy (London: His Maj-
esty’s Stationery Office, 1949), p. 193.

George C. Marshall, in Department of State Bulletin, vol. 16 (June 15, 1947), p.
1 160.

2.

(pages 77-131) Notes 497

3. Czechoslovakia and Poland also accepted but were forced by the Kremlin to
withdraw.

4. Quoted in W. L. Clayton, Selected Papers of Will Clayton , Frederick J. Dobney,
ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), p. 216.

5. Jean Monnet, Memoirs, Richard Mayne, trans. (Garden City: Doubleday 8 c
Company, Inc., 1978), p. 91.

6. Peter Calvocoressi , Survey of International Affairs, 195/ (London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1954), p. 113.

7 . The Parturition of Europe

1. Jean Monnet, Memoirs, Richard Mayne, trans. (Garden City: Doubleday 8 c
Company, Inc., 1978), p. 303.

2. Ibid., pp. 289-94, and Jean Monnet , Memoir es (Paris: Fayard, 1976), pp. 343-
50.

3. Frangoise Giroud, lecture at Princeton University, November 26, 1978.

4. Raymond Aron, “Historical Sketch of the Great Debate,” Daniel Lerner and
Raymond Aron, eds., France Defeats EDC (New York: Frederick A. Praeger,
1957), p. 10.

5. Walter Lippmann, CBS Reports: Conversations with Walter Lippmann (Boston:
Atlantic-Little Brown, 1965), pp. 213-14.

6. Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, Richard
Howard and Annette Baker Fox, trans. (Garden City: Doubleday 8 c Com-
pany, Inc., 1966), pp. 18-19.

7. George W. Ball, The Discipline of Power: Essentials of a Modern World Structure
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968), p. 124.

8. Ibid., p. 120.

9. George W. Ball, “Introduction” to Jean Monnet, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 14.

8. A Washington Lawyer

1. John Morton Blum, ed., The Price of Vision. The Diary of Henry A. Wallace:
1942-1946 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1973), p. 314.

2. Ibid., p. 331.

3. Ibid., p. 332L

9 . Stevenson

1. Walter Johnson and Carol Evans, eds., The Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson: Gov-
ernor of Illinois, 1949-1953 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973), vol.
3 > P- 534 -

2. The March 17, 1952 handwritten letter was reconstructed by Stevenson sev-
eral days later, and this phrase was added. John Bartlow Martin, Adlai Steven-
son of Illinois: The Life of Adlai E. Stevenson (Garden City: Doubleday 8 c Com-
pany, Inc., 1976), p. 542.

3. The Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson, p. 534.

4. Ibid., p. 535.

5. William Costello, The Facts About Nixon: An Unabridged Biography (New York:
Viking Press, i960), p. 117.

6. George W. Ball, “With AES in War and Politics,” Edward P. Doyle, ed., As We
Knew Adlai: The Stevenson Story by Twenty-two Friends (New York: Harper 8 c
Row, 1966), pp. 152-53.

498 Notes (pages 146-198)

10. 1956 Campaign and After

1 . John Bartlow Martin, Adlai Stevenson and the World: The Life of Adlai E. Steven-
son (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1977), pp. 311-12.

2. Ibid., p. 368.

3. Ibid., p. 374.

4. Ibid., p. 373.

5. Ibid., p. 380.

6. Ibid., p. 425.

11. French Crisis and Stevenson Again ( 1958-1961 )

1. Oddly enough, the harshness of the conversation is not reported in any of
the books so far written — either in J. B. Martin’s biography of Stevenson or
A. M. Schlesinger’s or Theodore C. Sorensen’s account of Kennedy. Why
Stevenson blew off steam to me but to no one else may have been due to
momentary exasperation, for he found scatological expletives offensive.

2. John Bartlow Martin, Adlai Stevenson and the World: The Life of Adlai E. Steven-
son (Garden City: Doubleday 8 c Company, Inc., 1977), p. 534 -

3. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965), p. 157.

12. Early Kennedy Years

1. John F. Kennedy, “Algeria,” The Strategy oj Peace (New York: Harper 8c
Brothers, i960), p. 75.

2. Ibid., p. 77.

3. John F. Kennedy, “The Missile Gap Ibid., pp. 36-37.

4. Chester Bowles, The Conscience of a Liberal: Selected Writings and Speeches (New
York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 85.

5. Later, as sensitivity heightened, they became known as “developing coun-
tries,” though many were clearly not developing very fast, if at all. Still later,
they became the “Third World.”

6. My approach to figures resembles that of a woman I once sat next to at a
dinner party who was telling me of her experiences mountain climbing. “How
high did you climb?” I asked. “Oh,” she replied, “about five hundred feet.”
“But that’s not very high,” I remarked. “Oh dear,” she said, “I always get
those things mixed up; it was really five hundred thousand feet.”

13. The Context of the Time and the Kennedy Program

1 . Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965), p. 309.

2. John F. Kennedy, “Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981 Public Papers oj the
Presidents of the United States, 1961 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1962), pp. 1-2.

3. David Bell, The Cultural Contradiction of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books,
Inc., 1976), pp. 177-178.

15. The Tradesman s Entrance to Foreign Policy

1. There was good reason for my reluctance. For despite Prime Minister Mac-
millan’s private emphasis on the political need for Britain to play a role in

(pages 198-232) Notes 499

Europe, his government publicly concentrated on the purely economic
advantages of membership in the Common Market — or, more accurately, the
economic disadvantages of exclusion. Britain, as an outsider, would have to
sell its goods to member states over the barrier of the common external tariff,
while those nations within the Community walls would enjoy the benefits of
free trade.

2. Io assure that trade legislation would not impede British entry, I devised a
technical safeguard.

3. When he had first mentioned the word before he had used it in print, I had
voiced my own distaste for confusing the American vocabulary with foreign
words to express abstractions that were fuzzy in English, but I did not foresee
the mystique the word would ultimately acquire for many Americans.

4. John F. Kennedy, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1964 (Wash-
ington: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1964), pp. 460-61.

5. Robert Solomon, The International Monetary System , 7945-/976: An Insiders
View (New York: Harper 8c Row, 1977), pp. 38-39.

16 . The Mystique of a Grand Design

1 . I he name was, of course, grandiloquently inappropriate; what we envisaged
bore no relation either to Les Grands Desseins of Henry IV of France or to
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “great design” discussed at the Teheran Conference.
But, when the columnist Joseph Kraft used the phrase as the title for a book
discussing the Administration s early years, it acquired more currency than it
deserved.

2. D. C. Watt, Survey 0) International Affairs, 1961 (London: Oxford University
Press, 1965), p. 117.

3. Diary entry for Saturday, September 10, 1966, Cecil Harmsworth King, The
Cecil King Diary, 1965-1970 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), p. 92.

4. Harold Macmillan, At the End of the Day, 1961-1962 (New York: Harper 8c
Row, 1973), p. 111.

5. D. C. Watt, op. cit., pp. 147-48.

1 7 . Troubles in the Congo

1. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White
House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965), p. 554.

2. Ibid.

3. George Martelli, Experiment in World Government: An Account of the United
Nations Operations in the Congo, 1960-1964 (London: Johnson Publications,
1966), p. 58.

4. George Martelli described the Congo as follows: “Its geographical diversity,
and the number of its tribes and languages, make it more like an empire
than a colony. . . ."Ibid., p. 231.

5. George W. Ball, The Elements in Our Congo Policy, Department of State Pub-
lication 7326, African Series 25 (Washington: Department of State, 1961),
pp. 1-2.

6. Richard P. Stebbins, The United States in World Affairs, 1961 (New York: Har-
per 8 c Brothers, 1962), p. 254.

7. United Nations Document S/4426, adopted by the Security Council on August
9, i960. Catherine Hoskyns, The Congo: A Chronology oj Events, J anuary i960—
December 1961, Chatham House Memoranda (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1962), pp. 30-31.

500 Notes (pages 233-306)

8. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., op. cit., p. 576.

9. Jules Gerard-Libois, Katanga Secession , Rebecca Young, trans. (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), p. 181.

18 . The General and His Thunderbolts

j John F. Kennedy, “Address Before the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa,” Pub-
lie Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1961 (Washington: U. S. Govern-
ment Printing Office, 1962), p. 385.

2. George W. Ball, Address before the Council on Foreign Relations, New York
City. January 1 1, 1965, manuscript pp. i 4 -! 5 -

3. George W. Ball, Discipline of Power: Essentials of a Modern World Structure (Bos-
ton: Little, Brown and Company, 1968), pp. 84-85.

4. Piers Dixon, Double Diploma : The Life oj Sir Pierson Dixon , Don and Diplomat
(London: Hutchinson 8c Co., 1968), p. 302.

5. W. W. Kulski, De Gaulle and the World, Foreign Policy of the Fifth Republic (Syr-
acuse: Syracuse University Press, 1966), p. 280. Also, Richard P. Stebbins,
The United States in World Affairs, 1963 (New York: Harper 8c Row, 1964), pp.
99-ioo.

19 . Ayub Khan and Salazar

1. Salazar had come to power, therefore, through what I always thought was an
amusing accident, for, in a sense, he was the beneficiary the scandal. See Mur-
ray Teigh Bloom, The Man Who Stole Portugal (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1966).

2. Luis Vaz de Camoens, The Lusiads, William C. Atkinson, trans. (Harmond-
sworth: Penguin Books, 1952), pp. 39-40.

20 . The Cuban Missile Crisis

1. Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1969), pp. 89-90.

2. In one of the earliest published accounts of the missile crisis, Roger Hilsman
stated that President Kennedy raised the question of removing the obsolete
and vulnerable Jupiters from Turkey soon after his inauguration, but the
Berlin Crisis of 1961 deterred any action on that score. Secretary Rusk and
Paul Nitze, representing the Defense Department, raised the question with
the Turkish government at the NATO Ministerial Meeting in May 1962, but
the Turkish Foreign Minister strongly objected on political grounds; in order
not to strain our already touchy relations with Turkey, they did not pursue
the matter. Hilsman adds that “In the summer of 1962, Kennedy again raised
the matter with George Ball, who was Acting Secretary in Rusk s absence, and
after rejecting the State Department case for further delay, he ordered, in
August 1962, that steps be taken immediately to remove the American mis-
siles from Turkey. . . . Both the State Department and the Pentagon were
slow, however, and the missiles were still there.” [Roger Hilsman, To Move a
Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy
(Garden City: Doubleday 8c Company, Inc., 1967), p. 203.]

Elie Abel in his book The Missile Crisis repeats the story, pointing out that
Rusk and Nitze were told by the Turkish Foreign Minister, Selim Sarper, that
“the Jupiters were an indispensable token of America’s commitment to defend
its allies.” [Elie Abel, The Missile Crisis, (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co.,

(p a g e 306) Notes 501

i966), p. 190.] He then suggests that as too few Polaris submarines had yet
been commissioned to replace the Jupiters, the matter was temporarily
dropped. Abel further maintains that later that same summer the President
asked me, as Acting Secretary of State, about the Jupiters and that when I
told him it would be unwise to press the matter at that moment, “He [the
President] then and there directed that the missiles must be removed, even
at some political cost to the United States. Ball and Nitze talked it over with
the I urkish Ambassador in Washington and once more the reaction was neg-
ative. I he Ambassador warned the removal of the missiles would have a most
harmful effect on public opinion in I urkey. Nothing happened, though the
President, apparently, dismissed the missiles from his mind, assuming that
they were about to be removed, as ordered.” [Ibid., pp. 190-91.]

Professor Graham Allison, currently Dean of the John F. Kennedy School
of Govei nment at Harvard, seems to have swallowed the story whole. He
writes in his book, Essence of Decision: “Frustrated at this inaction, Kennedy
had 1 esorted to the most binding mechanism in the U.S. government for
registering decisions on matters of national security— a National Security
Council Action Memorandum (NASAM). In the third week of August 1962,
a NASAM ordered removal of the missiles, and he personally directed George
Ball (in Rusk’s absence) to pay the political price and remove the missiles. Ball
discussed the matter with the Turkish Ambassador in Washington and received
a warning that the removal of the missiles would have most harmful effects
°n Turkish public opinion. So nothing happened.” [Graham T. Allison, Essence
0) Decision : Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown and Co.,
1971), pp. 141-142.]

It is a piquant story, suffering only the slight disadvantage of being untrue.
I hat cynical British barrister Philip Guedalla once wrote that “history repeats
itself; historians repeat one another.” That was the case with the Turkish
missiles. I had at all times kept the President informed regarding the state of
negotiations with the I urkish government, and, while he wished the Jupiters
removed, he recognized the sensitivity of the situation and particularly the
uneasy state of our relations with I urkey. He w r as never taken by surprise;
from the very beginning of the missile crisis, he knew— and showed that he
knew— that the Jupiters were still in Turkey; indeed, he speculated that the
Soviets might respond to an airstrike against the Cuban missile bases with
a strike of their own against the Turkish Jupiters, and, in discussing the
matter with Stevenson he had rejected the idea that the withdrawal of our
Jupiters from I urkey be a quid pro quo for the Soviets’ withdrawal of the
Cuban missiles. Finally, the NASAM issued on August 23, 1962, did not, as
Allison suggests, order the removal of the missiles; instead, it stated that
I he Piesident has directed that the following actions and studies be under-
taken in the light of evidence of new bloc activity in Cuba. 1. What action can
be taken to get Jupiter missiles out of Turkey? (Action: Department of
Defense). [McGeorge Bundy, National Security Action Memorandum No.
181, August 23, 1962, p. 1.]

I hat was hardly a command to remove the missiles. Abram Chayes, then
the legal adviser to the State Department, has written in his own book on
the missile crisis: Allison s account as well as others leave the impression that
the President was unaware that his earlier order had not been carried out
and was angered to discover that the missiles were still in Turkey. It may well
be that he was angry. But as one who had some part in the efforts to carry
out those earlier orders, I cannot believe he was surprised. The delays and
obstacles in withdrawing the I urkish and Italian missiles had been fully and

502 Notes (pages 306-359)

currently reported to him. When the Cuban crisis began, he and other mem-
bers of the Executive Committee were aware of the status of these weapons.
Retaliation against Turkey because of the missiles there was considered a
possible Soviet response to any United States action from the outset. [Abram
Chayes, The Cuban Missile Crisis: International Crises and the Role of Law (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 96L]

3. Barton J. Bernstein, “The Cuban Missile Crisis: Trading the Jupiters in Tur-
key f Political Science Quarterly, Spring 1980, pp. 103-4.

4. Robert F. Kennedy, op. cit p. 87.

22 . Sailing under a New Skipper

1. An anecdote related by Nicholas deB. Katzenbach.

2. Quoted by Ernest W. Le fever, Spear and Scepter: Army, Policy and Politics in
Tropical Africa (Washington: Brookings Inst., 1970), p. 108, from Africa Review
(London, February 1966), p. 6.

3. M. Crawford Young, “The Congo Rebellion, Africa Report (April 1965), p.
1 1. Quoted by E. W. Lefever, op. cit., p. 109.

4. It is estimated that at least fifty thousand Congolese were killed by Congolese
in 1964 (Lefever, op. cit., p. 110).

23 . Cyprus

1 . Summarized by Edward Weintal and Charles Bartlett, Facing, the Brink. An
Intimate Study of Crisis Diplomacy (New York: Charles Scribnei s Sons, 1967)*
P- 23.

2. Ibid., pp. 23-24.

3. During the whole time I was involved with the agonies of Cyprus, I was con-
stantly aware of the constraints under which democratic nations must con-
duct diplomacy in these complex times. 1 hat was not always so; a century ago
the great powers could have disposed of the Cyprus problem quickly arid
incisively, as they showed by their disposition of a remarkably similar affair
involving a conflict between Greek and I urkish populations on anothei Med-
iterranean island — not Cyprus but Crete. In 1896 the Greek community in
Crete revolted and declared for union with Greece. I he Turkish government
moved to reinforce its garrisons on Crete, and the Greeks sent their fleet to
assist the rebels. In the gathering crisis the great powers of Europe acted
promptly and effectively. They sent a fleet to assist the rebels. I hey landed
an army and compelled the insurgents to cease bring while occupying key
coastal towns. They forced Turkey— which meanwhile had overwhelmingly
defeated the Greek army in Thessaly — to make peace with Greece on terms
favorable to the loser. Finally, after presenting identical notes to Athens and
Constantinople, the great powers decreed that Crete was neither to join Greece
immediately nor to revert to the Ottoman Empire.

That settlement was imposed upon the Greek and I urkish populations of
the island, as well as on the Greek and 1 urkish governments without seeking
their consent. It was possible because the great powers of the day were quite
ready to use their combined strength ruthlessly— without concern for the rights
of sovereignty, the integrity of territory, or the abstract principle of self-
determination.

The world of the 1960s no longer permitted such domineering interven-
tion, nor was there any longer a Concert of Europe; on the contraiy, the two
strongest world powers were now in opposing camps. Moreover, in the inter-

(pages 359-367) Notes 303

veiling years mankind had established rules and institutions designed to
discourage the direct interference by nations in one another’s affairs.

I hus effective American diplomacy under today’s conditions requires
constant vigilance of potential trouble spots such as Cyprus. Sometimes
America has shown that vigilance but more recently it has not. In Novem-
ber 1967, after I had left the government, another crisis occurred. Then
through the skillful diplomacy of Cyrus Vance, acting as special envoy of
President Johnson, war was averted for a second time.

4. Edward Weintal and Charles Bartlett, op. cit., p. 36.

5. Once, in a humorous speech at a newspaper dinner in honor of Dean Rusk
1 said tht early in our relationship Rusk had made clear that I would be his

alter ego. I was pleased at the time and it was only later when I reflected on
my childhood in Iowa and the operation farmers performed on their domes-
tic animals that I realized what might have been implied by that designation.

24 . Vietnam — The Initial Error

1. My enthusiasm for that war faded even more during the Stevenson cam-
paign of 1952 when Eisenhower’s sententious promise to go to Korea gained
him a cheap political advantage. Stevenson had fretted throughout the cam-
paign about the need to come forward with a rational peace initiative, and I
had spent hours secretly conferring with Adrian Fisher, then the Depart-
ment of State’s legal adviser, trying to write a speech that would soberly
analyze our Korean predicament and propose a solution through negotiated
settlement. I hough Adlai made that speech — a watered-down version of
it it is lost to posterity and, in a sense, never really existed. Against all
advice, he chose as his forum the Brooklyn Music Hall just at the end of the
* 95 2 campaign. It was both egregious timing and impossible geography.
I he Brooklyn Music Hall was traditionally regarded as the place where
Democratic Presidential candidates wound up their campaigns in a purple
haze of hyperbole and fustian nonsense. Not only did Adlai’s high-toned
discussion totally mystify a rabble that expected to be aroused, but since he
drastically rewrote the speech just before he mounted the podium, there
were no copies available for the press. In fact, no one will ever know just
what Stevenson said since the speech was not broadcast and, in desperation,

I gave the single marked-up copy to a New York Times correspondent who
was racing to meet an overdue deadline. Since none of the speech ever
appeared in print, the reporter apparently lost the race. When afterward I
lamented the fact that it had been the wrong speech at the wrong time to
the wrong audience, Stevenson replied, “Well, I didn’t make it for that bunch
of bums and hangers-on at the Brooklyn Music Hall, I made it for the
American people. “You think you did,” I sadly replied, “but they never
knew it.”

2. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John Kennedy in the White House
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965), p. 163.

3. Ibid., p. 325.

4- Speech befoie the American Friends of Vietnam. Quoted by Guenter Lewy,
America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 12-13.

5. The Pentagon Papers, as published by the New York Times (New York: Bantam
Books, Inc., 1971), p. 142.

6. Ibid., p. 143.

7. Ibid., p. 148.

5°4 (pages 367-391)

8. Ibid., p. 148-50.

9. Ibid., p. 151.

10. Ibid., p. 149.

1 1 . Ibid., p. 151.

12. Ibid., p. 152.

1 3. By the time of Kennedy’s death, in November 1963, there were over 16,000
American troops in Vietnam.

14. Far too little attention has been paid to the political power that has so often
been exerted in the Orient by strong-minded women. Chinese history is
filled with examples of women of indomitable whim — like the seventh-cen-
tury concubine who overthrew the Tang Dynasty, or Tz’u-hsi, who impris-
oned her nephew-emperor and ruled as dowager empress until 1908; in
more modern times, there have been Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and most
recently Mao’s widow, Jiang Quing, an ex-actress and prostitute who led the
Gang of Four that turned the Cultural Revolution into an orgy of repression
and disruption.

15. The Pentagon Papers, op. cit., p. 194.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., p. 195.

18. Ibid., p. 197.

19. Ibid., p. 175.

20. United States Congress, House Committee on International Relations,
Hearings before the Subcommittee on International Relations, House of
Representatives, 94th Congress, First Session, July 15, 22, 23, and 24, 1975,
Reassessment of U.S. Foreign Policy (Washington: U. S. Government Printing
Office, 1975), p. 145.

21. David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House,
1972 ), P- 494 -

25 . The Balloon Rises Quickly

1. The Pentagon Papers, as published by the New York Times (New York: Ban-
tam Books, Inc., 1971), p. 129.

2. On June 9, 1964, in answer to a question from the President, the CIA stated
that “no nation in the area would quickly succumb to Communism as a result
of the fall of Laos and South Vietnam.” Nor, the study proceeded, would “a
continuation of the spread of Communism in the area ... be inexorable”
while “any spread which did occur would take time . . . in which the total
situation might change in any number of ways unfavorable to the Commu-
nist cause.” Ibid., p. 254.

3. Ibid., pp. 49 j - 92 -

4. Jonathan Schell, The Time of Illusion (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), pp.
9- to.

5. George Santayana, The Life of Reason or the Human Progress (New York: Charles
Scribner 8 c Sons, 1905), vol. 1, p. 13.

6. The Pentagon Papers, op. cit., p. 325.

7. Ibid., p. 425.

8. Since I do not wish to misrepresent the position of any of my colleagues, I
must note a qualification at this point. Before the four of us met with the
President on February 13, 1965, Mac Bundy called to correct this statement
of the views attributed to him. The burden of his qualification, my notes
would indicate, is that I was incorrect in stating that he believed that we must

(pages 39 1 “4°8) Notes 505

continue to increase military pressure “to the point where Hanoi is prepared
to agree not only to stop infiltration from the North, but effectively to call
off the insurgency in the South and withdraw those elements infiltrated in
the past.’ His position — if I now properly recall his explanation — was that
since “we did not know what the answer [would] be,” we did not have “to
follow a particular course down the road to a particular result.” He was, in
other words, qualifying our declared war aim of restoring South Vietnam
to the status quo ante the Viet Cong insurgency, by opting to leave our objec-
tive unformulated and therefore flexible. T hough I privately applauded his
pragmatism, I could not agree that we should keep charging more deeply
into the mire without clearly acknowledging where we were going and on
what basis we would call a halt.

9. Based on Jack Valenti, A Very Human President (New York: W. W. Norton,
! 975 )’ PP- 3 1 9 ~ 4 °» supplemented and modified by the information from
my own notes and recollections.

10. I hough in the light of subsequent knowledge, I may have overstated the
dangers of a possible Chinese intervention, we then knew almost nothing
about what was going on in Chinese foreign policy. Governmental and party
announcements repeatedly emphasized that an historic moment had arrived
for the world revolution under Communist leadership, and the United States
was ritualisticallv denounced as the major impediment. In September 1965,
Marshall Lin Piao, Minister of Defense and the Deputy Premier, was to star-
tle the Administration — and particularly upset Secretary of Defense McNa-
mara — by publishing a long harangue announcing China’s support for “wars
of national liberation.” That emphasized the people’s struggle against United
States imperialism in Vietnam and elsewhere, including areas of Asia, Africa,
and Latin America. In that climate, it was normal to feel concerned at the
prospects of such a move. After all, my memorandum was written only four-
teen years after we had precipitated a Chinese intervention in Korea by
getting too near the Chinese border, and no American could say with assur-
ance that we might not bring down Chinese mass armies on our troops.

26 . The Dusty End of a Reign of Error

1. 1 he Pentagon Papers , as published by the New York Times (New York: Ban-
tam Books, Inc., 1971), p. 470.

2. 1 he Pentagon Papers , the Senator Gravel Edition. The Defense Department His-
tory of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam (Boston: Beacon Press, n.d.),
vol. 4, p. 623.

3. Betraying his prime interest in influencing American opinion, President
Johnson told me with some pride: “That’s the right touch. Send a Tew to see
the Pope.”

4. Janos Radvanyi, Delusion and Reality: Gambits , Hoaxes & Diplomatic One-
Upmanship in Vietnam (South Bend, Indiana: Gateway Editions, Ltd., 1978).

5. The Pentagon Papers, New York Times, op. cit., pp. 579-80.

6. Before his appointment to the Pentagon, Clif ford had, as chairman of the
President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, toured the Pacific with
General Maxwell Taylor to solicit Asian governments to send troops to assist
in Vietnam. He was, he told me later, profoundly shaken by the refusal of
Asian nations to offer anything more than advice and encouragement. If
Vietnam’s neighbors did not take the war seriously enough to help the United
States, why should we carry on alone at such great cost?

506 Notes (pages 4 10-423)

7. He was later sufficiently generous to observe in my presence and that of a
number of other people that “George Ball was the only one who was right
all along and we made a great mistake not to follow him.”

8. Allan E. Goodman, The Lost Peace: Americas Search for a Negotiated Settlement
of the Vietnam War (Stanford: Hoover Inst. Press, 1978), p. 78.

9. Tad Szulc, The Illusion of Peace: Foreign Policy in the Nixon Years (New York:
Viking Press, 1978), p. 158.

10. Ibid., p. 268.

1 1. Marvin Kalb and Bernard Kalb, Kissinger (Boston: Little, Brown and Com-
pany, 1974), p. 120.

12. Tad Szulc, op. cit., p. 150.

13. Henry A. Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown Sc Co.,

i 979 )> P- 279 -

14. Ibid., p. 207.

15. Richard Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset Sc Dunlap,

197 8 ) > P- 392-

ib. Henry A. Kissinger, “The Viet Nam Negotiations,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 47,
no. 2, (Jan. 1969), pp. 211-34.

17. George W. Ball, “We Should De-escalate the Importance of Vietnam,” New
York Times Magazine, December 21, 1969.

18. Robert Shaplen, A Turning Wheel: Three Decades of the Asian Revolution as
Witnessed by a Correspondent of the New York Times (New York: Random House,

1979) . P- !3-

19. Ibid., p. 12.

20. Henry A. Kissinger, The White House Years , pp. 281-82.

2 1 . Ibid., p. 443.

22. Henry A. Kissinger, The White House Years, p. 1412.

23. Ibid., p. 1462.

24. McGeorge Bundy, “Vietnam, Watergate Sc Presidential Powers,” Foreign
Affairs, vol. 58, no. 2 (Winter 1978/80), pp. 397-407.

25. Henry A. Kissinger, The White House Years, p. 1435.

26. As Professor Stanley Hoffmann has written, “. . . The reintroduction of
American troops was unthinkable, and airpower alone was unlikely to stop
the flood forever.” Indeed, as he points out, the Kissinger agreement “. . .
did not save us from humiliation, and — as with so much else in the Kissinger
era — consisted of what the French call reculer pour mieux sauter, a retreat that
merely postponed the apocalypse. ... we left the South Vietnamese to them-
selves, claiming to have remained loyal to our ally, yet in effect washing our
hands of the country’s fate, and insured that the victory of Hanoi, being a
military one, would wipe out not only Thieu but all the factions caught in
the middle. Yet we still claimed that we wanted to insure Saigon’s survival.”

Further, writes Professor Hoffmann, “. . . to keep feeding the Hames
(while pretending, in the last days of Saigon, that our supplies might “sta-
bilize” the situation long enough to provide for the negotiated political
accommodation we never sought to achieve when Thieu seemed in firm
control) would have been . . . callous. When we decided as late as 1 97 1 , to
maintain in power the cliques that relied on us, we made sure that we would
have a choice only between ignominious endings.” Stanley Hoffmann, Pri-
macy or World Order: American Foreign Policy Since the Cold War (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1978), p. 29.

27. T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace
Sc Co., c. 1943), p. 24.

28. George W. Ball, op. cit., pp. 82-83.

(pages 427-483) Notes 507

27 . The Decision to Resign

1. The Pentagon Papers, as published by the New York Times (New York: Bantam
Books, Inc., 1971), p. 129.

2. Ibid., p. 128.

3. A good illustration of this is President Jimmy Carter’s New Year’s Eve toast
to the Shah on December 31, 1977, just before the revolution, when he
described Iran as an “island of stability.” f lora Lewis, “Carter Will Meet Sadat
in Aswan on Wednesday,” New York Times, January 1, 1978, p. 10.

4. Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New r York: Harper 8 c
Row, 1976).

29 . From Nixon to Ford to Carter

1 . My articles also appeared in Listener, Columbia Journal of World Business, Atlan-
tic Papers, Survey, Harper s, Saturday Review, Finance, and many others, as well
as in French, German, Italian, and Japanese periodicals.

2. J. C. Hurewitz, The Persian Gulf: After Iran s Revolution, Headline Series 244
(New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1979), p. 45. Professor Hurewitz also
notes that: “Over the next half-dozen years, [following 1972] the Shah entered
into commitments for the purchase of more than $18 billion worth of weap-
ons, among them some of the most sophisticated systems in the inventories
of the United States and its Western allies — including T-14 Tomcat fighters
with Phoenix air-to-air missiles that give the fighter its 100-mile reach, P-3F
Orion antisubmarine patrol planes. Chieftain tanks, Spruance-class destroy-
ers, and the AWACS (airborne warning and control system), a plane which
even major allies of the United States found too expensive. The Shah was
able to do this because the United States in May 1972 had agreed to sell him
virtually any conventional military hardware he wanted. That decision was
taken by President Richard M. Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry
A. Kissinger — at a time, it should be noted, before anyone foresaw r the mon-
umental rise in the price of crude oil that w as about to take place in less than
20 months, placing in the Shah’s hands more money than he could have
anticipated in his wildest dreams. It proved a rash decision, which lifted all
normal U.S. restraints on the transfer of the most advanced conventional
weapons to Third World countries.” Other authors note that between 1970
and 1973 (before the oil price increase) American military sales had already
“gone from $1 13 million to more than $2 billion.” Michael A. Ledden and
William H. Lewis, “Carter and the Fall of the Shah: The Inside Story,” Wash-
ington Quarterly, spring 1980, p. 8.

3. Flora Lewis, “Carter Will Meet Sadat in Aswan on Wednesday,” New York
Times, January 1, 1978, p. 10.

30 . Over and Out

1. Gayler, Noel. “(II) A Way Out of the Nuclear Trap,” Washington Post, June
23, 1981 (second in a three-part series).

2. Lenin called the prerevolutionary Russian empire “a prison of peoples” and
was concerned by the Russian tendency towards imperialist behavior; in 1919
he rephrased a popular proverb into “scratch some of the Communists and
you will find Great Russian chauvinists.” Nevertheless, he later identified
whatever was good for the “national pride” of Russians as coinciding “with
the socialist interest of all other proletarians.” Quoted by Albert L. Weeks,

508 Notes (pages 484-494)

“Russia — The ‘Chosen Nation’,” Freedom at Issue, no. 50 (March-April, 1979),
p. 25.

3. In order to speed up Russification, non-Russians have been resettled from
their own respective republics; e.g., since 1940 14.6 percent Moldavians and
13.4 percent Ukrainians (5 million Ukrainians) have been sent eastward, while
the Russians have been dispatched to these republics. Ibid., p. 26.

This process is still active, and the 1979 census shows that from 197°’
Russians in the Ukrainian SSR have increased by 15 percent (or 1.3 million),
and thus now represent 21 percent of the population.

4. United Nations’ estimates are quoted for Mexico City at 15 million people in
1980, and expected to reach 31 million by the year 2000. Bernard D. Nossi-
ter, “World Population Explosion Is Slowing, U.N. Finds,” New York Times,
June 15, 1980, p. 10.

5. Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach,” Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (London:
Macmillan and Co., 1927), p. 227.

6. Humbert Wolfe, “The High Song,” Requiem (New York: George H. Doran
Co., 1927), p. 125.

Index

Abrams, Creighton, 408
Accords of Washington (1949), 83
Acheson, Dean, 6, 19, 32, 80, 84, 92,
106, 127, 264, 368, 432, 437
in Cuban Missile Crisis, 291, 292,
294, 296, 299

Cyprus problem and, 349-50,

355-5 8

Kennedy criticized by, 166, 168
Vietnam War and, 394, 407, 408-9
Acheson Plan, 357
Action Committee for the United
States of Europe, 95
Adams, Henry, 13

Adenauer, Konrad, 88-89, 21 U 214,
216, 269-70, 271, 272, 297, 335
de Gaulle’s relationship with, 260,
265, 273

Adoula, Cyrille, 256, 257, 258
Afghanistan, Soviet invasion of, 203,
472-73, 485

Africa, national boundaries in, 231-32
Agency for International Development
(AID), 183-85, 187
Agnew, Spiro, 436, 445
Agricultural Act (1961), 201
Air Force, German (GAF), 45, 62
Air Force, Royal (RAF), 43, 44-45
Air Force, U.S., 41, 43, 44, 49

Evaluation Board of, 42-43, 44,

45-47

Alexander, Henry Clay, 44, 60
Algerian crisis, 149, 152-57, 166-67,
216

Allen, Terry, 47
Alliance for Progress, 181
Allon, Yigal, 439

Alsop, Joseph, 107-8, 109, 122,384-85

America First Committee, 23
American Committee for Aid to

Katanga Freedom Fighters, 234
American Economic Review, 36
American Legion, 127, 141
Americans for Democratic Action, 1 13
American Society of Newspaper
Editors, 145-46
Anderson, George, 436
Anderson, Orville, 60
Anglo-French Coordinating Commit-
tee, 71, 72

Angola, Portuguese colonialism in,
275, 278, 279-80, 282
Arab-Israeli conflict, 136, 148, 176-77,
4J9> 434

oil issue and, 463, 465
Palestinian issue in, 439, 466-67
UN and, 438-40
Ardrey, Robert, 164
arms control, 160, 200, 273, 274, 472,
476-80

SALT and, 474, 476
Stevenson’s views of, 145-47,

1 5°~5 1 > 160

Arnold, Henry H. “Hap,” 27, 41
Arnold, Matthew, 448, 490
Aron, Raymond, 92, 96, 153
Arvey, Jacob, 46, 121
Ashmore, Harry, 139
Ataturk, Kemal, 343
Atherton, Alfred L., 458
atomic bomb, 61, 262, 470
see also arms control; nuclear power
Atwood, William, 323
Auden, W. H., 50
Austria, 210

neutrality of, 219-20

510 Index

Bailey, John, 130
Balaguer, Joaquin, 326-27, 331
balance of payments, 204, 205-7, 212
Balance of Payments Committee, 205
Ball, Amos, Jr. (father), 2-3, 4-6, 7,
8-9, 10, 47, 48

Ball, Amos, Sr. (grandfather), 1-4, 7
Ball, Douglas (son), 42, 75, 449
Ball, Edna Wildman (mother), 5, 7, 8, 9,
12, 13

Ball, George (great-uncle), 3
Ball, George W.:
adolescence of, 9-10
in Bilderberg Group, 104-6, 133,
229

bombing survey by, 41-55, 60-62,
69, 101, 406, 42 1

campaign contributions made by,
in Carter Administration, 452-54,

456-57

Chicago law practice of, 20-21, 24,

69

detachment of, 8, 10, 11
early years of, 6-9
education of, 6, 9-17
family background of, 1-6, 7
in Foreign Economic Administra-
tion, 37-41, 163

foreign policy as developing interest
of, 21

Grand Tour of, 12-13
historical setting for birth of, 5-6
in Humphrey campaigns, 444-48,
45 1 ’ 45 2

inventiveness of, 21, 40-41
in Kennedy task force, 159-62, 163,
164

in Lend-Lease Administration, 24,

27. 29-39. 163

marriage of, see Ball, Ruth Murdoch
mentors of, 10-11
as Monnet’s lawyer, 69, 72-95, 164,
462-63

at Nassau Conference, 263, 265-68,

335

New Deal programs and, 17-20
Pyke’s projects and, 24-28
Salazar’s correspondence with,
279-82

speeches of, 144-45, 156, 194,
232-33,261-62,326,434,450-51,

465

State Department appointments of,
106, 161-62, 163, 172, 367
in Stevenson Presidential draft and
campaigns, 113-17, 121, 122-33,
136-40, 142-48
as UN ambassador, 436-44
as Washington lawyer, 99-1 10, 132,
148

Ball, Isaac (great-grandfather), 1, 3
Ball, John (son), 22, 42, 449
Ball, John (uncle), 2, 8
Ball, Ralph (brother), 5, 7-8, 12, 13
Ball, Ruth Murdoch, 16, 20, 24, 42, 75,
99, 111, 112, 117, 122, 131, 164,
180,425

courtship and marriage of, 13,
16-17,494

Cuban Missile Crisis and, 304-5,
308-9

George influenced by, 8, 17
as George’s travel companion,

21-23, 153-54. 196-97. 326, 434.
435. 448

illnesses of, 47-48
strength of character of, 7, 16, 17,48
Ball, Selina Scoble (grandmother), 1-3,
4-5

Ball, Stuart (brother), 5, 6, 7-8, 10,
12 - 13,494

Bancamerica-Blair Corporation, 70-7 1
Bandung Conference (1955), 176
Bankhead, Tallulah, 129
Barkley, Alben W., 120
Barrymore, Ethel, 129
Bartlett, Charles, 359
Barzani, Mustafa al-, 454
Battle, Lucius, 169

Baudouin, King of Belgium, 225, 226
Bay of Pigs invasion, 169, 170, 171,
286, 287, 330, 363
Beerbohm, Max, 127
“beggar-thy-neighbor” tactics, 32
Belgium:

Congo crisis and, 175, 224-26, 228,
231, 258, 322, 323-25
EEC and, 208, 260
Ben Gurion, David, 176
Bennett, Tapley, 327-28, 329
Benoit, Pedro Bartolome, 328
Benton, William, 157, 158
Beplatt, Tristan E., 434
Berlin, Isaiah, 80
Berlin Blockade (1948-1949), 91

Bernal, J. D., 25

Bernhard, Prince of the Netherlands,
105

Bernstein, Burton J., 306

Bernstein, Edward, 204

Best and the Brightest, The (Halberstam),

384

Bhutto, Zulhkar Ali, 282, 283, 284,
285,315

Bilderberg Group, 104-6, 133, 229
Black Mischief (Waugh), 227
blacks, 489

African roots of, 185
civil rights of, 136, 137, 140, 165
unemployment of, 182
Blair, William, 122, 139, 140, 142
Blair & Company, 70
Blatnik, John A., 136
Bloom, Sol, 38-39
Blum, Leon, 76-77, 101, 120
Blum, Robert, 76

Blumenthal, W. Michael, 199-200,
452 - 53 , 456-57
Bohlen, Charles, 288-89
Bombing Analysis Unit, British, 45
Boorstin, Daniel, 24
Boothby, Robert, Lord, 106
Borch, Otto H., 441
Borisov, Sergei, 202
Bormann, Martin L., 56, 58
Bosch, Juan, 327, 328, 329, 331
Bowen, William G., 452-53
Bowie, Robert, 88-89
Bowles, Chester, 132, 161, 170-72,
l 97, 230, 283
Braden, Spruille, 40
Bradley, Omar, 47, 408
Brannon Plan, 1 17
Braun, Eva, 56, 58
Brave New World (Huxley), 469-70
Brazil, 182, 278, 429
Brentano, Heinrich von, 272
British Broadcasting Corporation
(BBC), 63-66

British Channel Tunnel Company, 1 10
British Supply Council, 72
Bruce, David, 89, 90, 94
Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 173, 457-58,
460-62

Bullis, Harry, 104
Bunche, Ralph, 233, 257
Bundy, McGeorge, 164, 172-73, 189,
258, 268, 312, 313, 419, 457

Index 5 1 1

in Cuban Missile Crisis, 288-89, 292,
296, 307

in Johnson Administration, 328, 329,

3% 3 8 4> 3 8 9-9 0 . 39i. 399- 4°2,
4O5, 406, 408, 428, 434
Bundy, William P., 388, 389, 399,
428-29

Bunker, Ellsworth, 329-30
Bureau of International Organization
Affairs, 230-31
Bush, Vannevar, 24
Butler, Paul, 141
Butler, Richard A. “Rab,” 346
Byrnes, James A., 39, 61

Calles, Plutarco, 104
Cambodia, U.S. invasion of, 410-11,
412, 417

Camoens, Luis de, 276-77

Canfield, Cass, 95

capitalism, 181-82

Caradon, Lord, 442, 443

Caraway, Hattie, 196

Caraway, Paul Wyatt, 196

Carlson, Paul, 324

Carlyle, Thomas, 97

Carstens, Karl, 272-73

cartels, 87-89, 186, 463-64, 468

Carter, Jimmy, 134, 1 81, 203, 453, 466

Ball’s meetings with, 451, 452,
460-62

Presidential campaign of, 451-52
Carter Administration, 190, 325, 419,
451-62

Carver, George, 408
cash-and-carry system, 30
Castro, Fidel, 41, 177, 297, 308-9, 330
CEEC (Committee of European
Economic Cooperation), 77-80,
220

Centralia Mine disaster (1947), 1 13
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
171, 287, 288, 311, 362, 372, 373,
395’ 459’ 460

Central Treaty Organization
(CENTO), 275, 298
Chapman, Oscar, 1 13
Charlton, Michael, 63
Chase Bank, 20
Chayes, Abram, 171, 293
Chiang Kai-shek, 108, 166, 440
Chicago Council on Foreign Relations,

2 1

5i2 Index

China, Communists vs. Nationalists in,
108, 166

China, People’s Republic of, 133, 273,

473

African relations of, 322, 325
India attacked by, 258, 276, 294
Pakistan’s relations with, 282, 283,
284

role in Southeast Asia of, 179, 363,
366, 367, 377, 378, 388, 391, 400,
404, 406, 410

U.S. fear of, 179, 282, 284, 377
Christopher, Warren, 190, 191-93,
460

“Chunnel” Project, 109-10
Churchill, Sir Winston, 25, 26, 71-72,
167

CIA (Central Intelligence Agency),
171, 287, 288, 311, 362, 372, 373,

395> 459> 460
Cicero, 467

civil rights, 136, 137, 140, 165
Civil War, U.S., 7, 201
Clark, Mark, 436
Clay, George, 324
Clayton, Will, 78
Cleary, George, 101
derides, Glafkos, 346
Cleveland, Harlan, 230, 295, 312, 350
Clifford, Clark, 402-3, 407, 408, 414,
429, 436

Coal and Steel Community, 90-91, 93,
94, 95, 186, 208, 209, 215, 463
Cohen, Ben, 24
Cold War, 82, 83, 85, 87, 481
Dulles’s views of, 177, 178, 180, 200,
275, 361-62, 486
German role in, 83, 86, 88, 91, 93
in Kennedy Administration, 146,
165, 169, 171, 200
in Reagan Administration, 474-75
Coleman, John S., 104, 105
Collado, Emilio, G., 463
colonialism, 31, 175-76

British, 31, 154, 209, 216, 264
French, 92, 93, 94, 148, 152-57,
166-67, 175, 176, 216, 361,
363-64, 378, 382, 396, 415, 426
Kennedy’s views of, 149, 166-67, 222
Portuguese, 275, 278, 279-80, 282
Stevenson’s views of, 149
“Comite Ball,” 102
Commerce Department, U.S., 193

Committee for a National Trade Policy,
104, 164

Committee of European Economic
Cooperation (CEEC), 77-80, 220
Committee to Defend America by
Aiding the Allies (William Allen
White Committee), 23
Common Market, see European
Economic Community
Communism, Communists, 100, 165,

233- 349. 481-83

in Dominican Republic, 327, 328,
329, 330
in France, 76, 92
Nixon's views of, 127, 178, 234
Salazar’s views of, 281-82
Third World views of, 482
see also China, People’s Republic of ;
Cold War; Cuban Missile Crisis;
Soviet Union

“Compromise Solution for South Viet-
nam, A” (Ball), 398-99
concentration camps, 57, 63, 67, 76
Conein, Lou, 373
Congo, 222-59, 278

end of Belgian colonialism in, 175,

225- 26

Johnson Administration and,

322-25

as keystone to Africa, 229
post-independence leaders of,

226- 27

UN force in, 227-29, 230-31, 232,
233. 234. 256-58, 322
U.S. hostages in, 323-25
Congo, French, 225
Congress, U.S., 19, 38-39, 78-79, 150,
166, 184, 198, 234, 311, 326
Congo crisis and, 234-56, 258
Cuban Missile Crisis and, 287, 291,
298

Lend-Lease and, 30, 33, 34-35, 36
textile lobby and, 188, 190, 191
Vietnam War and, 373, 374, 379,
380, 403, 418-20

wheat sales to Soviets and, 201-2,
203

see also Senate, U.S.

Connally, John, 320-21
Connor, John, 24
Conrad, Joseph, 57, 104
Coolidge, Calvin, 31
Cooper, Chester, 428-29

Index 313

Council of Europe, 86, 87
Couve de Murville, Maurice, 265, 269,
271

Coward, Noel, 66
Cowles, John, 407
Cox, Hugh, 101
Cox, Oscar, 24, 25, 37, 40
Crowley, Leo T., 38-39, 41, 72
Cuba, 39-41, 103, 161, 177, 286
African role of, 282
Bay of Pigs invasion and, 169, 170,
171, 286, 287, 330, 363
Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), 200, 258,
270, 272, 286-310, 330, 473
advantages of blockade in, 292-94
background of, 286-88
Khrushchev’s messages in, 303-6
missile sites discovered in, 288-89
press leaks in, 293, 296-98
in retrospective, 309-10
Stevenson’s dissent in, 294-96
sweeping up in, 308-9
Trollope Ploy in, 306-7
Currie, Lauchlin, 107, 108
Cutler, Lloyd, 24, 394
“CuttingOur Losses in South Vietnam”
(Ball), 396-97
Cyprus, 336-59

Ball’s meetings with Makarios in,
343746

Constitution of, 338
independence of, 338
Soviet role in, 338, 357-58, 359
start of U.S. involvement in, 341-42
strategic location of, 337, 342
UN role in, 338, 340-41, 342,
347-48, 349, 350, 351, 355-56,
35 8 .

Czech crisis, 440-44

DAC (Development Assistance Com-
mittee), 195-97
DAG (Development Assistance
Group), 191, 195, 196, 211
Daladier, Edouard, 71
Daley, Richard J., 121
Darwin, Charles, 469
Davidson, Alfred E., 34, 36
Davidson, Frank, 109
Dayan, Moshe, 439
Dean, Arthur, 408
Decline of the West , The (Spengler),
14-15, 469

Defense Department, U.S., 171,

1 73-74* 263, 362, 369
Kennedy appointees to, 161, 162
de Gaulle, Charles, 1 1, 71-72, 87, 155,
157, 169, 207, 214, 215, 216, 314,
350, 351, 485

Adenauer’s relationship with, 260,
265, 273

Ball’s talks with, 331-34, 377-79,
397

Brazzaville statement of, 225
British EEC membership opposed
by, 221, 268, 269, 270-71, 272
Cuban Missile Crisis and, 295, 296,
. 2 97> 299

directorate proposed by, 259-60
EDC opposed by, 92, 93
Johnson’s views of, 336
Macmillan’s meetings with, 259,
264-65, 266, 268
Monnet compared to, 96-98
Vietnam War and, 377-79, 385, 405
democracy, 140-41, 185

Ball’s views on threats to, 66-67, ! 44 >

489

Democratic conventions:
of 1944, 108
of 1956, 140-42
of i960, 158-59

Democratic National Committee, 123,
J 25

Democrats, Democratic party:
in election of 1952, 113-31
in election of 1956, 132-48
in election ofi96o, 133, 158-60, 167,
188

in election of 1968, 444-48
in election of 1976, 451-52
Depression, Great, 15-20, 164-65
DePuy, William, 408
detente, 200-203, 309, 480-81
developing countries,^ Third World;
specific countries

Development Assistance Committee
(DAC), 195-97

Development Assistance Group
(DAG), 191, 195, 196, 211
De Voto, Bernard, 10-11, 115, 119
Dewey, Thomas, 112, 123, 172
Dick, Jane, 122-23
Diefenbaker, John, 210, 297
Diem, Ngo Dinh, 364, 365, 370, 371,
372 - 74 ^ 427

514 Index

Dien Bien Phu, fall of (1954), 93, 156,
361, 364

Dillon, C. Douglas, 161, 166, 173,
204-5, 207, 408, 409
in Cuban Missile Crisis, 288-90, 292,
2 95

Dirksen, Everett, 405

Discipline of Power, The (Ball), 425

Disraeli, Benjamin, 81

Dixon, Sir Pierson, 269

Dobrynin, Anatoly, 287, 298, 307, 308

Dodd, Thomas J., 234

Doenitz, Karl, 51, 58, 65

D’Olier, Franklin, 44

dollar gap, 203-5

Dominican Republic, U.S. intervention
in, 326-31

domino theory, 361, 364, 366, 385
psychological, 386-87
Donahue, Libby, 115, 116
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 483
Douglas-Home, Sir Alec, 216, 315, 346
Douhet, Julio, 42 1
Dragon Rouge, 323-25
Dryfoos, Orvil, 296-97
Dry Salvages (Eliot), 422
Dulles, Allen W., 362
Dulles, John Foster, 71, 149, 150-51,
176, 186, 364, 409, 425, 481
Cold War as viewed by, 177, 178,
180, 200, 275, 361-62, 486
de Gaulle’s negotiations with, 259,
260

Eastman, Max, 100
Economic Consequences of the Peace , The
(Keynes), 33, 464

economics, economic theory, 20, 160
capitalism vs. socialism as, 181-82
depressions and, 15-20, 129, 164-
65, 277

development, 183, 184, 205, 275-76
in Kennedy Administration, 165,
182, 203-7

in Roosevelt Administration, 19-20
Stevenson’s views of, 117, 119
after World War I, 31, 35, 70, 75
World War II and, 30-36, 72, 75,

77-83

see also specific countries
Economist , 35, 443

EDC (European Defense Community),

9 2 -94

Eden, Anthony, 93-94, 176
EEC, see European Economic Com-
munity

EFTA (European Free Trade Associa-
tion), 210, 211, 215, 216, 218-20,
270

Ehrlich, Thomas, 394
Eighth Air Force, 43, 62
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 45, 103, 132,
165, 167, 176, 177, 185, 259, 361
conditions for U.S. aid as viewed by,

397. 415- 16

heart attack of, 133-35, 22 9
Macmillan’s communications with,
149 ’ ! 5 °> 2 °9

as 1952 Presidential candidate, 115,
118-19, 120-21, 123, 124, 127,
128, 129-31, 143-44. 1 7 2
as 1956 Presidential candidate,

1 33 - 35 . 1 3773 8 .. 14 !> 147 - 48 , 17 2
Stevenson’s criticism of, 133, 148,

151

Eisenhower, Milton, 103
Eisenhower Administration, U.S-
Laotian relations in, 361-62
election of 1944, 108-9
election of 1948, 111, 112, 123, 172
election of 1952, 113-31, 135, 172
television’s role in, 123-25, 128,

143-44

election of 1956, 131-48, 172
accidental issues in, 145-48
Democratic convention in, 140-42
early Democratic planning for,
i3 2 -33

Florida primary in, 135, 137-40
Minnesota primary in, 134-37, 138
role of television in, 124, 138-39,
140, 142-45

election of i960, 158-60, 188, 425
Democratic convention in, 158-59
foreign policy issues in, 133, 159, 167
election of 1968, 136,410,444-45,446,
447

“Eleventh Lend-Lease Report,’’ 34
Eliot, T. S., 100, 422
Elizabeth II, Queen of England, 186
Ellis, Havelock, 14
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 395, 419
EOKA (Cypriote organization), 337,
357

Erhard, Ludwig, 184, 214, 273, 310,

3 1 5> 335- 426

Erkin, Cemal, 354
Eshkol, Levi, 439
E ura tom, 95
Europa (ship), 22-23
Europe:

creation of, 86
U.S. alienation from, 480-81
European Defense Community (EDC),
92-94

European Economic Community
(EEC), 80, 87, 95, 1 10, 197,

208- 18, 221-22, 266, 271, 310
British refused entry into, 110,

209- 18, 221-22, 260, 266
economic success of, 210
members of, 208

political character of, 208-9, 210,
212-13, 215, 260
European Free Trade Association
(EFTA), 210, 211, 215, 216,
218-20, 270

European Political Community, 93
Evans, Rowland, 452
Evanston Township High School, 9-10
ExCom, 286, 288-308, 434

hawks vs. doves in, 290-92, 303
members of, 288

“Face the Nation,” 445

Far Eastern Economic Review, 1 9 1

Farm Credit Administration, 17, 18-19

Faymenville, Philip, 108

Federal Bureau oflnvestigation (FBI),

329

Federal Communications Commission,
148

Federal Farm Board, 19
Feldman, Myer, 189, 190
Fickel, Jacob, 42, 43
“Fifth Lend-Lease Report,” 33
finletter, Tom, 142, 149, 150, 295
Finletter group, 132, 133, 145
Finnegan, Jim, 133, i 39 , 141, 142
Finney, Tom, 158
Fitzgibbons, Harry, 446
Foch, Ferdinand, 70
Fomin, Alexander S., 303
Ford, Gerald, 167, 410, 451
Foreign Economic Administration,
37 - 4 L 113* 163
Cuban mission of, 39-41
Forrestal, Mike, 372
Fortas, Abe, 329, 408

Index 575

Foster, William C., 161-62
Fouchet, Christian, 260
Fowler, Henry, 189
France, 148
CEEC and, 77-80

colonial wars of, 92, 93, 94, 148,
152-57, 166-67, *75> *7 6 > 216,
3 6i, 3 6 3 -64, 3 78, 3 8 2 , 3 q6, 415,
426

Congo crisis and, 231, 256
Constitution of 1958 in, 97
de Gaulle’s vision of, 259-60
EEC and, 208, 213, 221-22, 268,
269, 270-71, 272
German rapproachement with, 210,
211, 214, 216, 222, 260, 265,
270-73

NATO and, 151, 259-60, 261, 265,
272, 273, 331-34

nuclear issue and, 151, 259, 261, 262,
264-65, 267, 270, 27 3 , 33 2- 33
OEEC and, 80, 81
Patronat in, 101-2, 154, 224
reconstruction of, 75-80, 82-83,
84-87

in World War II, 23, 27, 42, 43,

44 _ 45 > 5 °> 7 !- 72 , 7 6
France Actuelle, 102
Franco-German Treaty (1963), 271-73
Frankfurter, Felix, 18
Franks, Sir Oliver, 77
Freeman, Orville, 136
French Supply Council, 69, 72, 75, 155
Freud, Sigmund, 6 n
Friedman, Milton, 464
Friendly, Henry, 101
Fulbright, J. William, 132, 162, 163,
403

Gaillard, Felix, 155
Gaitskell, Hugh, 106, 216, 266, 267
Galbraith, John Kenneth, 44, 49, 51,
54-62, 132, 162, 276, 370, 428,
437

Gallup Poll, 158, 216
Galo-Plaza Lasso, 350
Gamov, George, 22
Gandhi, Indira, 442
Gardiner, Robert A. K., 257
Gardner, Richard N., 36, 204
Garrison, Lloyd, 149
GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade), 172, 272

516 Index

Gayler, Noel, 475
Gbenye, Christophe, 322, 324, 325
General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT), 172, 272
Geneva Accords (1954), 364, 365
German Air Force (GAF), 45, 62
German Democratic Republic (East
Germany), 271, 481
Germany, Federal Republic of (West
Germany), 184-85, 259
Cold War role of, 83, 86, 88, 91, 93
EEC and, 208, 210, 214, 222
French fear of, 83, 85-86, 87, 91
French rapprochement with, 210, 211,
214, 216, 222, 260, 265, 270-73
nuclear power and, 260-62, 265,
269-70, 273, 274, 332-33, 334
Ostpolitik in, 274, 334-35, 480-81
rearmament of, 87, 91, 92, 93
Germany, Nazi, 21-24, 30, 32, 49-68,
76, 165

bombing surveys and, 42, 43, 44-45,
49 _ 55> 61 - 62

Germany, reunification of, 210, 211,
271

Germany, Weimar, economic depres-
sion in, 2 1

Ghana, Volta project in, 185-87
Gilpatric, Roswell, 263-64, 288-90,
308

Vietnam War and, 366, 367, 368,
37 1- 7 2

Giraud, Henri, 72
Giroud, Frangoise, 87
Giscard d’Estaing, Valery, 98, 106, 194
Gizenga, Antoine, 226, 227, 228, 229,
23 2 > 2 33> 3 22

Glucksman, Lewis, 449, 451

Goebbels, Joseph Paul, 22, 55-56

Goering, Hermann, 54, 55

Goldberg, Arthur, 405, 428, 436, 438

“Goldilocks Principle, the,” 388

Gombault, Charles, 269

Gordon, Lincoln, 429

Gore, Robert, 190

Gottlieb, Leo, 101

Goulart, Joao, 429

Graham, Billy, 445

Graham, Philip, 24

Grand Design, 208-22

as “dumbbell theory,” 220
evolution of concept of, 208-9
failure of, 221-22, 268
Great Britain, 23, 58, 83, 148

Ball family’s origins in, 1-2
bombing surveys and, 41-43, 44-45,
48-49

CEEC and, 77, 79-80
Congo crisis and, 231, 232
Cuban Missile Crisis and, 299-300
Cyprus and, 337, 338, 340, 341, 343>

346, 347> 346
economy of, 210, 217, 221
EDC and, 93

EEC and, 1 10, 209-18, 221-22, 260,
266

EFTA and, 210, 211
imperial interests of, 31, 154, 209,
216, 264

Lend-Lease and, 30-32, 36, 37
nuclear power and, 260, 261, 262-68
OEEC and objections of, 80-82
Suez crisis and, 148, 176
U.S. agreement with (Feb. 23, 1942),

3 2

U.S. special relationship with, 81,
209, 221, 265-66, 267, 268
U.S. test-ban agreement with, 146
Great Depression, 15-20, 164-65
Great Society, 318-19
Greece, 165

Cyprus problem and, 337-59
Green, Fred, 406
Greenwald, Joseph, 213
Grinwis, David, 323
Grivas, George, 337, 357, 358
Grivas Plan, 357

Gromyko, Andrei A., 169, 171, 292,
298

Guantanamo Bay, U.S. base at, 294,
2 95

Guevara, Che, 194
Gullion, Edmund A., 230, 257
Gunther, Violet, 113

Habbakuk Project, 26-27
Habib, Philip, 408, 409
Hajek, Jiri, 441
Halberstam, David, 384
Hallstein, Walter, 89
Hamburg raids (1943), 61-62
Hamilton, Fowler, 41 , 43, 101, 102, 184
Hammarskjold, Dag, 227, 228, 229-30,
2 33

Harding-Coolidge era, mindless com-
placency of, 15

Hare, Raymond, 295, 341, 350, 351
Harkins, Paul, 373

Index 5/7

Harlech, Lord, 265-66, 340
Harper, Paul, 21
Harper, William Rainey, 21
Harpers magazine, 115
Harriman, Averell, 79, 134, 135, 172,
2 95* 297, 312, 314, 371, 372, 405,
446

Harris, Allen, 115-16
Hauge, Gabriel, 133
Healey, Denis, 106, 178
Heart of Darkness, The (Conrad), 57
Heath, Edward, 106, 21 1-13, 214, 216,
269

Hee, Park Chung, 434
Heller, Walter, 205, 206, 308
Helms, Richard, 372
Herter, Christian, 78-79, 198-99, 261
Hillenbrand, Martin, 297
Hilsman, Roger, 288, 298, 371, 372
Himmler, Heinrich, 56
Hiroshima, bombing of ( 1 945), 6 1 , 470
Hirsch, Etienne, 84
Hiss, Alger, 107, 108
Hitler, Adolf, 2 1 , 24, 5 1 , 55, 56-57, 6 1 ,
63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 103, 165, 178,
470

Ho Chi Minh, 362, 363-64, 406, 412

Hodges, Luther, 189, 198

Hodgson, Ralph, 491

Hoffacker, Lewis, 257

Hoffman, Paul, 161

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 296, 494

Holt, Harold, 336

Hong Kong, U.S. competition with,
188, 189, 191
Hoover, Herbert, 234
Hoover, J. Edgar, 321-22, 329, 336
Hopkins, Harry, 24, 25, 34
Hoyt, Michael, 323
Hughes, Thomas, 171
Hugo, Victor, 1

Humphrey, Hubert, 136, 140, 158,

*94* 39°’ 4°9> 4io
Presidential campaigns of, 444-48,
45 L 452

Humphrey, Muriel, 447
Hungarian revolt (1956), 148
Hussein, King of Jordan, 439
Huxley, Aldous, 469-70

Ignatieff, George, 441-42
Ikeda, Hayato, 197
immigration, U.S., social problems
and, 488-89

India:

British rule in, 154, 175
China’s attack on, 258, 276, 294
economy of, 182, 275-76
Pakistan’s poor relationship with,
275-76, 282, 284

U.S. relations with, 275-76, 282, 283
Indochina, French colonialism in, 92,
93* 94* i53* *55* !5 6 * 166, 175
Inonu, Ismet, 341, 343, 347, 348, 350,

35 2 - 353-55. 356

Inter-Allied Supply Committee, 70
Internal Revenue Act (1936), 20
International Control Commission,

363* 3 6 4* 393.-94* 4
International Institute for Strategic
Studies, 178

International Monetary Fund (IMF),
207, 464, 465

International Ruhr Authority, 83
Iran, U.S. relations with, 325, 434-36,

453762

isolationism, 21, 23, 119, 165
British, 209-18
Israel:

U.S. politics influenced by, 136, 138
see also Arab-Israeli conflict
Italy, 259

EEC and, 208, 2 1 1
U.S. missiles in, 289, 293, 295, 306,
307

Jackson, Barbara Ward, 137, 185
Jackson, C. D., 105
Jackson, Sir Robert, 185
James, William, 100
Japan, 218

OECD and, 196-97
U.S. competition with, 188, 189, 191
in World War II, 23, 43, 60, 61, 108,
406, 470

Jernagan, Jack, 344
Johannmeier, Willi, 57-58
Johnson, Louis, 368
Johnson, Lyndon B., 74, 132, 134, 141,
152, 349* 425-33

Ball’s post-State Department service
for, 434, 436-44

Ball’s relationship with, 426, 429-30
Cyprus problem and, 341, 345, 347,

352753* 354-55* 35 6
Dominican Republic and, 328, 329,

330

educational inferiority of, 426, 428

ji 8 Index

Johnson, Lyndon B. (continued)

Erhard and, 335, 426
Humphrey’s Presidential campaign
and, 444, 445-47

Kennedy compared to, 3 1 7, 320, 32 1
Kennedy’s assassination and,

312-13, 315-16, 317

personality of, 315, 317, 318, 335,

336

press as viewed by, 321-22
second Presidential term declined
by, 409

tragedy of, 375, 426
as Vice-President, 184, 203, 315-16,
317-18, 427, 445
vision of, 318-2 1

Johnson, U. Alexis, 293, 298, 314-15,

37L 394

Johnson Administration, 317-59
Anglo-American relations in, 336
Congo troubles in, 322-25
Cyprus problem in, 336-59
U.S. intervention in Dominican Re-
public in, 326-31
U.S. -Panamanian relations in,
325-26, 330

Vietnam War in, 174, 319, 325,

330-31. 336, 359, 368, 374-409.
410, 413, 414, 419, 422, 424-33
Joint Chiefs of Staff, 293, 306, 367,
368, 399, 460
Joint Target Group, 60
Joyce, James, 13, 14
Jupiter missiles, 289, 293, 295, 299,

305- 6

Kaldor, Nicholas, 60
Karamanlis, Konstantinos, 343
Karr, Alphonse, 174
Kasavubu, Joseph, 226, 227, 228, 232,
234, 322

Katanga rebellion (i960), 227-58, 278
Katzenbach, Nicholas, 359
Kaysen, Carl, 189, 196, 206
Kearns, Doris, 427-28
Keating, Kenneth B., 288
“Keeping the Power of Decision in the
South Vietnam Crisis” (Ball),
395-96

Kefauver, Estes, 120, 134, 135, 136,

*37> !47

Stevenson’s television appearance
with, 138-39, 140

in Vice-Presidential contest, 140,
141-42

Kennedy, Jacqueline, 164, 168, 312,

3*3

Kennedy, John F., 134, 140, 141-42,
149, 171, 214, 283, 476
assassination of, 164, 310-16, 317,
374

Ball’s memoranda to, 209, 217-18
in Cuban Missile Crisis, 286, 287,
288, 290, 291, 292-93, 294, 295,
298-300, 303-7, 309-10
foreign policy views of, 149, 161,
165-67, 200, 222, 229, 233, 361,
364, 366-67

Johnson compared to, 317, 320,

321

Nassau Conference and, 263,
265-68, 335

personal style of, 164, 167-68
Presidential campaign of, 133, 158,
159-60, 167, 188

speeches of, 180, 182, 261, 294, 297,
298-300

Stevenson’s report to, 159-62

Kennedy, Joseph P., 141, 158, 165-66,
205

Kennedy, Robert, 142, 187, 373, 382
in Cuban Missile Crisis, 287, 288-92,
*95> 3°5> 3°7

Kennedy Administration, 160-316
aid to Third World in, 183-88
Congo crisis in, 222-59
Cuban Missile Crisis in, see Cuban
Missile Crisis
early years of, 163-74
economic problems in, 165, 182,
203-7

environment of, 163-65
Grand Design of, 208-22, 268
in historical context, 174-82
new approach to Third World in,
181-82

New Deal compared to, 164-65
Southeast Asia policy in, 361,
362-63, 364-74, 375, 383
U.S. -Pakistani relations in, 275-76,
282-86

U.S. -Portuguese relations in, 275,
276-82

U.S. -Soviet relations in, 146, 165,
169, 170, 171, 174, 177-79, 200-
203, 258, 270, 272, 286-310

Index 5/9

Vietnam War in, 364-74, 375, 383,
427

Kent, Carleton, 1 14
Kent, Frank, 144
Kenyatta, Jomo, 323
Keynes, John Maynard, 33, 464
Khan, Ayub, 276, 278, 282-86
Khartoum Declaration (1967), 439
Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 434,
459, 460, 461, 462

Khrushchev, Nikita, 165, 171, 177,
272, 308, 357-58, 473-74
Cuban Missile Crisis and, 286, 287,
289, 290, 293-94, 295, 297, 299,
300,302,303-6,307
Killick, John, 218

Kindleberger, Charles, 45, 47, 78, 80
King, Cecil Harmsworth, 218
Kissinger, Henry, 106, 173, 178, 359,

45 °> 454 » 457 ’ 4^6
Vietnam War and, 373, 411, 413,
414-15, 416-17, 418-20, 421
Kitchen, Jeff, 361
Klein, Lawrence R., 452-53
“knock-for-knock” agreements, 37
Knox, Frank, 24, 46
Knox, William, 300
Kohler, Foy, 405
Komer, Robert, 183
Kong Le, 362

Korea, economic growth of, 434
Korean War, 88, 90-91, 129, 165, 360
Vietnam War compared to, 366, 381,
393, 400

Kosygin, Aleksei N., 390
Kraft, Joseph, 209
Krulak, Victor, 372
Kummel, Gene, 142
Kuter, Lawrence, 436
Kuznetsov, Vasily, 307, 308
Ky, Nguyen Cao, 397, 427
Kyprianou, Spyros, 341, 343, 346

labor issues, 113, 117, 136, 187

in textile industry, 188, 190, 192-93
in wheat sales to Soviets, 202-3
Labouisse, Henry, 80, 357
Lagrange, Maurice, 88
Laird, Melvin, 410, 413
Langtry, Lily, 1-2
Laos, 260, 361-63, 388, 410, 417
Lattimore, Owen, 107, 108
Lawrence, David, 121, 142

Lawrence, D. H., 14
Lawrence, T. E., 25
League of Nations, 22, 70, 71, 82
Le Due Tho, 418, 420
Lee, John M., 261
Lee, Sir Frank, 211, 212-13, 214
Lehman, Robert, 437
Lehman Brothers, 434, 436-37, 449,
45 1

LeMay, Curtis, 60, 410
Lend-Lease Act (1941), 30, 36, 165
Lend-Lease Administration, 24, 27,
2 9~39> 72, 108, 163
definition problem and, 30-31
merger of, 37-39
policy statement attempted by,
33-36

politics of, 31-33
varied duties of, 36-37
Lewis, John L., 113
Life in Our Time , A (Galbraith), 60
Life Magazine, 152

Lincoln, Abraham, 130, 138, 427-28
Linebacker II (Christmas bombing)
0972), 392, 405’ 420-21
Lin Piao, 179

Lippmann, Helen, 99-100, 119, 138
Lippmann, Walter, 95, 96, 99-100,
132, 138, 177, 180, 200, 305, 405,
430-31

election of 1952 and, 118-19, 12 8
Lipson, Leon, 107
Lloyd, David, 113, 115, 116
Lloyd Post, 22

Lodge, Henry Cabot, 371, 372-73, 374,
375’ 402

Loeb, James, Jr., 113, 115, 116
London-Zurich Accords (1959), 338,
340, 342, 347, 355
Look Magazine, 115-16
Lord Jim (Conrad), 57
Lovett, Robert, 71, 79, 80, 292, 295
Lubin, Isador, 24, 34
Lumumba, Patrice, 226, 227-28, 232,

234

Lusiads, The (Camoens), 276
Luxemburg, Rosa, 483
Lyautey, Louis, 153

MacArthur, Douglas, 360, 377
McCarthy, Eugene, 159
McCarthy, Joseph, 106, 129, 133

j2 0 Index

McCarthyites, in election of 1952, 127,

1 2 9

McCarthy years, 14, 67, 106-9, 1 7 2 ’
470-71

McCloy, John J., 71, 88-89, 99, 104,
308, 407

McCone, John, 287, 288, 290, 292, 295,

3°3’ 3 0 5> 3 1 1 ’ 3 2 4> 37 2 > 4 28
McGhee, George W., 256, 258
McGowan, Carl, 120, 137, 142, 152
McGrory, Mary, 467
McLuhan, Marshall, 124
Macmillan, Harold, 149, 150, 186,

209-10, 211, 216, 217-18, 219,
231, 258, 297

de Gaulle’s meetings with, 259,
264-65, 266, 268

Nassau Conference and, 263,
266-68, 335

Washington visited by, 213-15
McNamara, Robert, 161, 164, 173-74,
205, 274, 313, 323, 328, 341, 372,
377, 393, 395, 426, 428
Ball’s disagreements on Vietnam
War with, 383, 390, 391, 392, 396,
398-99, 400, 406

in Cuban Missile Crisis, 288-92, 294,
2 95, 2 97~9 8

DeSoto Patrols and, 379-80
quantitative measurements made by,
in Vietnam War, 1 74, 369-70, 392,
398, 400, 41 1

Rusk’s cooperation with, 368
Skybolt and, 263-64
Taylor-Rostow report and, 366, 367
Vietnam-related memoranda of,
368, 373, 391, 404

McNaughton, John, 385-86, 388,

406-7, 412, 428-29
Makarios III, Archbishop, 337, 338,
340-41, 342, 343-47, 349, 353,
354, 356, 357, 35 8 , 359
Malik, Yakov, 440-43
Malraux, Andre, 64, 471
Mann, Tom, 329

Mansfield, Mike, 390, 403, 405, 450
Mao Tse-tung, 322
Marjolin, Robert, 77, 80, 81, 221
Marris, Adam Denzil, 80
Marshall, George C., 108, 129, 169
Marshall Plan, 77 - 79, *3 8 ’ 1 ^ 1 » 1 ^5»
166, 187

Martin, Edwin, 288-89, 293, 299

Martin, John Bartlow, 127, 130, 329
Martin, William McChesney, 205
Marx, Karl, 201, 482, 490
Mattingly, Garrett, 1 1
Maudling, Reginald, 2 1 1
Means, Gardiner, 20
“Meet the Press,” 118
Meissner, Karl Wilhelm, 22
Menderes, Adnan, 315
Mendes-France, Pierre, 92, 93-95, 106,
121, 155, 410
Menzies, Robert, 175, 220
Messersmith, George S., 39
Mikoyan, Anastas, 308-9, 314
Millais, Sir John, 2
Miller, William G., 453
Mills, Wilbur, 198
MIRV technology, 476
Mist Procession , The (Vansittart), 493
Mitchell, Billy, 42 1
Mitchell, Stephen, 133
Mobutu, Joseph-Desire (Mobutu Sese
Seko), 226, 228, 322
Mohammed Riza Pahlevi, 453-62
Ball’s report on, 458-60
coronation of, 434-36
Mollet, Guy, 105, 106, 176
Monnet, Jean, 69-99, 141, 155, i57>
164, 208, 209, 232, 462-63,

49 1_ 9 2

background of, 69-71
coal and steel plan of, 84-91
death of, 98-99
de Gaulle compared to, 96-98
European army proposed by, 91-94
personality of, 74-75
thought processes of, 72-74
in World War II, 7 1-7 2
Monnet, Sylvia, 74, 95, 99
Monroe Doctrine, 177, 289, 291
Monroney, A. S. “Mike,” 158
Montgomery, Sir Bernard, 51, 110
Morgan, J. P., 31

Morgenthau, Henry, Jr., 17, 18, 19, 83,
9 1

Mountbatten, Louis, Lord, 25, 26-27
Moyers, Bill, 328, 392, 394, 396
Moynihan, Patrick, 314
Mozambique, Portuguese colonialism
in, 275, 278-79

Multilateral Force (MLF), 262, 265,
266-67, 269-70, 274, 335
Munoz-Marin, Luis, 329

Murdoch, Ruth, see Ball, Ruth Mur-
doch

Murphy, Charles, 113, 116-18
Murphy, Robert, 52, 55, 57, 176, 408
Murray, Thomas E., 145
Murrow, Edward R., 144, 171
Musa, Mohammad, 284
Muskie, Edmund, 451

Nassau Conference (1962), 263-68,

276. 335

de Gaulle’s reaction to, 268, 269,
270-71

maneuvering prior to, 264-66
Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 176, 439
National Association of Manufactur-
ers, 102

National Front for the Liberation of
Angola (FNLA), 275
National Security Affairs, Special As-
sistant to the President for, 1 72-73
National Security Council (NSC), 186,
288, 298, 434, 457-58, 460, 462
Nehmer, Stanley, 190
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 176, 276, 297, 350
Neustadt, Richard, 167-68
neutrality, 21, 176, 180, 185, 206,
219-20, 266, 267
of Cuba, 294-96
of Laos, 362-63
New Deal, 17-20, 69

Ball’s employment in programs of,
17, 18-20

early Kennedy years compared to,
164-65

economic policies of, 19-20
excitement of, 15, 18, 164
New International Economic Order,
*95

New York Herald Tribune , 234, 321
New York Times, 73, 161, 234, 296-97,
310

New York Times Magazine , 58, 416
Nhu, Ngo Dinh, 370, 371, 372, 374
Nitze, Paul, 44, 51, 54-57, 60, 78,
289-90, 293, 303

Nixon, Richard M., 67, 130, 133, 215,
234

Christmas bombing ordered by, 392,
405, 420-21

in election of i960, 133, 159, 167,

425

Index 521

in election of 1968, 136,410,444-45,

446, 447

Johnson’s fallacies perpetuated by,
410-13, 422, 425
megalomania of, 410, 419, 420
Shah of Iran and, 454-55
Thieu’s secret letters from, 418-20
U.S. bargaining leverage lost by,

4 1 4 _1 5, 4 1 1 7
as Vice-President, 177, 178
as Vice-Presidential candidate,
127-28, 141

Vietnam failure as viewed by, 373,
410, 422

Nixon Administration, 147, 359,
450-51, 463-64

Vietnam War in, 373, 392, 405,
409-21,422,425
Nixon Doctrine, 454, 458-59
Nkrumah, Kwame, 185-87
nonaligned nations, 176, 275-76
Norman, Craig and Kummel, 142
Norstad, Lauris, 60, 260-61, 267
North Atlantic Treaty, 332
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO), 91, 93, 160, 166, 219,

259- 61, 265, 267, 271, 272
Cuban Missile Crisis and, 295, 298,

3°5- 6

Cyprus problem and, 338, 340, 341,

343» 35<L 35 L 353
France and, 151, 259-60, 261, 265,
272, 273, 331-34

nuclear issue and, 150, 151, 259,

260- 61, 265, 267, 332-33, 334,

477-78

Portuguese role in, 275, 278
Summit Conference of (1957),
149-5 1

North Korea, Pueblo incident and, 436
North-South problem, 486-89
Northwestern Law School, 15-17
Northwestern University, 9, 10-11,
1 3“ 1 5

“Notes de Reflexion,’’ 84-87
NSC (National Security Council), 186,
288, 298, 434, 457-58, 460, 462
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, 274,
479

nuclear power, 61, 160, 178, 260-70,
469, 470-72, 474-80
NATO and, 150, 151, 259, 260-61,
265, 267, 332-33, 334, 477-78

522 Index

nuclear power (< continued )
proliferation of, 478-79
Stevenson’s views of, 112, 145-47,
150, 151

Vietnam War and, 410, 418-19
Nuremburg trials, 54, 63, 64, 66, 67

O’Brien, Larry, 446
O’Donnell, James P., 58
O’Donnell, Kenneth, 288-89
Office of Economic Warfare, merger
of, 37-39

Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 50,
61

oil, 103, 104, 462-66, 468, 481
as political weapon, 465-66
Okun, Arthur M., 452-53
Oliphant, Herman, 17, 19
Operation Overlord (invasion of Nor-
mandy), 27, 44-45, 53
Organization for Economic Coopera-
tion and Development (OECD),
160, 161, 195, 220-21, 486

DAC of, 195-97

Organization for European Economic
Cooperation (OEEC), 80-82, 86,
! 95 , 22 °

Organization of African Unity (OAU),
3 2 3

Organization of American States
(OAS), 292, 294, 299, 328, 329,

33 °

Organization of Petroleum Exporting
‘ Countries (OPEC), 463-64, 4 68
Ormsby-Gore, Sir David (Lord Har-
lech), 265-66, 340
Oswald, Lee Harvey, 31 1, 312
Ottawa agreements, 31

Pakistan, U.S. relations with, 275-76,
282-86, 315

Palestinian issue, 439, 466-67
Panama, U.S. relations with, 325-26,

33 °

Panama Canal Company, 325
Papandreou, Andreas, 349
Papandreou, George, 348-49, 350,

352-53. 354. 355. 356. 357

Paraskevopoulos, Ionnis, 343
Paris Summit Conference (i960), 177
Parkhouse, Sarah Scoble “Sally”
(great-aunt), 2, 3

Pascal, Blaise, 464
Pastore, John O., 190
Pathet Lao, 362, 363
Patronat, 101-2, 154, 224
Peace and War (Aron), 96
Pearl Harbor, Japanese attack on, 23,
165, 291

Pentagon Papers, 374
Perez Jimenez, Marcos, 103
Pershing, John Joseph, 8
Persian Gulf, strategic importance of,
462-64

Peterson, Peter G., 449
Philip, Prince, 106, 315
Phoui Sananikone, 362
Phoumi Nosavan, 362, 363
Pickard, Sir Cyril, 344, 345
Pinay, Antoine, 105
Pleven, Rene, 91, 92, 106
Pleven Plan, 92
Plough Project, 25-26
Point Four Program, 170, 183, 184
Poland, 202, 274, 335, 480, 484
Polaris submarines, 261, 263, 265, 266,
267, 268, 270
Pomian, John, 105
Portugal, 210

colonial interests of, 181, 275, 277,
278, 279-82
economy of, 276, 277
U.S. relations with, 27, 275, 276-82
Powers, Francis Gary, 177
Pravda, 219

Prebisch, Raoul, 193, 195
Prelude (Wordsworth), 18
President’s Special Representative for
Trade, 198

Project Wintergreen (Stevenson in-
formation center), 115
Pueblo incident, 436
Pyke, Geoffrey, 24-28
Pykrete, 26-27

Quang Due, 370

Quebec Conference (1943), 27, 34
Quinn, William, 283, 284, 285
quotas, U.S., 103, 189, 190-93

Radio Moscow, 305, 307
Randall, Clarence, 186, 187
Rashish, Myer, 204
Raskin, Hy, 133
Rauh, Joseph, 24

Index

Rayburn, Sam, 141, 163
Reagan, Ronald, 203, 486
Reagan Administration, U.S.-Soviet
relations and, 473, 474-75
Reed, John, 100
Reischauer, Edwin, 171, 196-97
Reischauer, Haru, 196, 197
Republicans, Republican party:

in election of 1952, 114, 118-19,
120-21, 123, 124, 126, 127-28,
129-31, 143-44

m election of 1956, 133-35, 137-38,
141, 147-48, 172

in election of i960, 133, 159, 167,

425

in election of 1 968, 1 36, 4 1 o, 444-45,
446, 447

in Illinois, 114, 119, 1 23
in Kennedy Administration, 161,
162

Reston, James, 126, 148,296, 430, 458
Retinger, Joseph H., 104-5
Reuter, Paul, 84
Reynaud government, 71-72
Ridgway, Matthew, 360, 365, 408, 409
Roberto, Holden, 275
Rockefeller Foundation, 150
Rodgers, Richard, 129
Rogers, William, 173, 450
Roll, Eric, Lord, 260
Rome Treaty, 210, 212, 214, 215, 218,
222

Roosa, Robert, 204, 205, 452-53
Roosevelt, Franklin, Jr., 202
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 17, 18, 19, 29,
31, 38, 165, 167, 168
Lend-Lease and, 30, 31, 33-35, 36
Pyke’s projects and, 25, 26
Wallace and, 107, 108-9
Root, Elihu, Jr., 41

Rostow, Eugene, 24, 25-26, 27-28, 30,
33

Rostow, Walter, 1 84, 312, 363, 365-66,

367. 374. 411, 427-28, 434, 458

Royal Air Force (RAF), 43, 44-45
Rusk, Dean, 106, 150, 161, 163, 164,
168-69, 1 7°» 263, 324, 328, 331,

359> 425^ 44°> 45 1
background of, 360, 426
in Cuban Missile Crisis, 288-90, 292,
293* 294, 298-99, 303-4, 306-7
Cyprus problem and, 345, 346,
35°-52, 357

5 2 3

Kennedy assassination and, 3 1 o, 3 1 1 ,

3 1 3 “ 1 4 » 3*5

Vietnam War and, 368, 371-72, 383,

3 8 4 > 392, 393 » 4°2, 404, 406, 407,
408, 428, 431
Rusk, Virginia, 425
Russell, J. Fred, 60
Russell, Richard B., 234-56
Rykens, Paul, 105

Saar problem, 70, 82-83
Sacco and Vanzetti case, 14
Sadat, Anwar el-, 451, 466
Sainteny, Jean, 41 1
Salazar, Antonio, 275, 276-82
Salinger, Pierre, 293
Salisbury, Harrison, 297
SAL I talks, 474, 476
Sandys, Sir Duncan, 340, 341, 342-43,
346

Santayana, George, 100, 387
Savimbi, Jonas, 282
Scali, John, 303, 304
Schacht, Horace Greely Hjalmar, 32
Schaetzel, Robert, 212, 367
Schell, Jonathan, 386
Scheuer, Sidney, 39-40
Schlesinger, Arthur, 50, 115, 119, 131,
132, 158, 161, 164, 222
Schmidt, Helmut, 65, 98, 106
Schroeder, Gerhard, 265, 272, 288
Schuman, Robert, 84, 91
Schuman Plan, 84-87, 88-91, 102, 215,
222

Scoble, Sarah, see Parkhouse, Sarah
Scoble “Sally”

Scoble, Selina, see Ball, Selina Scoble
Searls, J. Fred, Jr., 60, 61
SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Or-
ganization), 275, 298, 361, 369
Senate, U.S., 29, 129, 132, 450
Committee on Interstate and
Foreign Commerce of, 190
Foreign Relations Committee of, 79,
163, 165, 222

McCarran Subcommittee in, 107-8,
109

Senior Advisory Group, 407-9, 419
Shaplen, Robert, 416
Sharon, John, 158, 160-62
Shelepin, Alexander, 405-6
Shuebel, Reggie, 143
Sick, Gary, 457

524 Index

Sidley, McPherson, Austin and
Harper, 21

Sikorski, Wladyslaw, 104
Simba warriors, 323, 324-25
Singer Corporation, 449
Sisco, Joseph, 350, 438-40
Skybolt (air-to-surface missile),

262-65, 266
Smith, Dutch, 122-23
Smith, Gerard, 261
Smith, Walter Bedell, 105, 364
“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,”

3°

social institutions, U.S., disintegration

of, 4 8 9-9 j

socialism, 181-82
Solomon, Robert, 204
Sorensen, Theodore, 163, 164,

288-89, 292, 294, 297, 307
Souphanouvong, Prince, 362
Southeast Asia Treaty Organization
(SEATO), 275, 298, 361, 369
Souvanna Phouma, 362
Soviet Union, 77, 176, 472-78, 480-85
African relations of, 185-86, 226,
227-29, 232, 258, 281-82, 322,

325 > 472 , 473
Chase Bank loan to, 20
China’s relations with, 108
Cyprus problem and, 338, 357-58,

359

Czech crisis and, 440-44
Eastern Europe and, 148, 287
economy of, 177, 182
Germany and, 271-72, 274, 334-35,
480-8 1

ideological changes in, 481-82
Kennedy assassination and, 311,312
in Persian Gulf, 462
significance of troubles in, 484-85
in Southeast Asia, 363, 388, 390, 404,
405-6

threats to structure of, 483-84
UN role of, 228-29
U.S. embargos against, 203
U.S. test-ban agreement with, 146,
200

U.S. wheat sales to, 201-3, 311
Wallace’s trip to, 107-9
in World War II, 37, 54-55, 56,
57-58, 60-61, 63

Spaak, Paul Henri, 81, 258, 322, 323
Spaatz, Carl “Tooey,” 43, 45

Spaeth, Carl, 2 1
Spang, Joseph, Jr., 104
Speer, Albert, 51-58, 60, 61-68, 471
Speer, Hilde, 62

Spellman, Francis, Cardinal, 130
Spencer, Herbert, 469
Spengler, Oswald, 14-15, 469, 470
Spivak, Sidney, 51, 52, 58, 59
Spock, Benjamin, 146
Springsteen, George, 293, 311, 320,
336, 380

Staley, Eugene, 36

Stalin, Josef, 165, 177, 308, 470, 483

Standard Oil Company, 4-5, 8, 9, 449,

463

State Department, U.S., 32, 36, 78, 79,
90, 163-433

African Bureau of, 185, 230, 275
Ball appointed Under Secretary of
State in, 1 72

Ball as Acting Secretary of State in,

i7U 35°> 359> 429

Ball’s resignation from, 404, 406-7,

424-33

Ball’s responsibilities in, 163-64,
171-72, 182-83
Congo policy of, 229-59
duties assigned to, 311-12
in Eisenhower Administration,

European Bureau of, 231
Kennedy appointees to, 161-62, 163
Stettinius in, 29, 30, 37-38
U.S. mission’s relation with, 230-31,
256

Steen, Melvin, 101

Sterling- Dollar Diplomacy (Gardner), 36
Stettinius, Edward R., 29-30, 37-38, 40
Stevens, Robert T. B., 190
Stevens, Roger L., 99, 123, 125
Stevenson, Adlai E., 23, 24, 48, 1 1 1-52,
157-62, 170, 215
background of, 115
Ball’s friendship with, 21, 111-12,
151-52, 157-58, 256
controversial views held by, 136,
145-48

in Cuban Missile Crisis, 294-96, 300,
301-2

Cyprus problem and, 340-41, 342
death of, 21, 152
divorce of, 119, 134
in election of i960, 158-60

Index 525

foreign policy views of, 117, 119,

12 9> l 33’ *3 6 > 13^ 148, 149^

150-5 1 ’ J 59’ 160-61
as Governor of Illinois, 111-12,
113-14, 115, 117, 118, 119, 127,
152

indecisiveness of, 113-18, 119-20,

1 49~5°’ !5 2
as moderate, 136, 137
NATO and, 149-51
as 1952 Presidential candidate,
H3-3 1 ’ *35

as 1956 Presidential candidate,
132-48

Nixon’s attacks on, 127-28, 133
nomination of, 121-22
speeches of, 119, 120, 122, 124-25,
130, 132, 133, 135, 138, 141, 142,

145-47

Strategic Bombing Survey and, 44,

45-47

as UN ambassador, 230-31, 256,
257, 258, 288, 294-96, 300, 301-2,
340-41, 342, 437
Stevenson, Ellen, 44, 46, 112, 119
Stevenson, John Fell, 116
Stevenson Campaign Committee, 123
Stewart, Sir Michael, 218
Stimson, Henry L., 41
stock market crash (1929), 15
Strategic Bombing Survey, U.S.,

44-47, 60-62, 69, 101, 406, 421
Strategy of Peace, The (Kennedy), 161
Strauss, Joseph, 214
Strontium 90, 146, 147
Struelens, Michel, 234
Suez crisis (1956), 148, 156, 176-79,
186, 224

Sukarno, Achmed, 169, 176, 286
Sullivan, William H., 458, 461
superpower system, ending of, 485
Swatland, Donald, 71
Sweden, EFTA and, 210, 219
Switzerland, 210

neutrality of, 219-20

Taft, Robert A., 114, 119, 121
Taft-Hartley Labor Law, 1 17
Taiwan, 133, 182, 188
Talbot, Phillips, 297
Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de, 24,
410

tariffs, 31, 32, 35, 172, 198, 209, 210,
21 1

Tass News Agency, 299
Taylor, Ed, 266

Taylor, Maxwell, 372, 373, 375, 381,
388-89, 392, 393, 394, 400, 41 1
Cuban Missile Crisis and, 288-89,
292

Taylor-Rostow report, 365-66, 367,

374’ 395

Technical Studies, 109-10
television:

criticism of, 138, 143, 144
in election ofi 956, 124, 138-39, 140,
i4 2 -45

as innovation in political campaigns,
123-25, 128, 143
viewer attention spans and, 143
Tenche, Benjamin Montgomery
(Benmont), 138
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 493
Textile Committee, 189, 190
textile industry, 188-93
Thant, U, 233, 256, 257, 258, 300,
301-2, 307, 350, 355-56
Thatcher, Margaret, 106
Thatcher Ferry Bridge, 326
Thieu, Nguyen Van, 415, 416, 418-20,

. 427

Third World, 170, 182-97

demographic pressures in, 487-88
Kennedy Administration’s new ap-
proach to, 181-82
nonaligned movement in, 176,
275-76

North-South problem and, 486-89
Soviet role in, 176, 177, 178-79, 181,
185-86, 226, 227-29, 232, 258
Stevenson’s interest in, 112, 149,
150-51, 256
U.S. aid to, 183-88
U.S. trade with, 187-200
see also specific countries
Thompson, Llewellyn, 202, 290, 292,

293-94’ 3 o6 "7’ 3 12 > 39°’ 39 1
Thorneycroft, Peter, 263, 264, 266
Time magazine, 114, 115
Times (London), 28
Tito, Josip Broz, 176
Tobin, James, 206
Tomlinson, William M., 89-90
Tonkin Gulf Resolution, 380
trade, 31-32, 36, 103-4, 187-200

526 Index

trade (continued)

EFTA and, 210, 211, 215, 216,
218-20, 270
GATT and, 172, 272
Trade Agreements Extension Act, 166
Trade and Development Board, 194
Treasury Department, U.S., 36, 89-90,
161, 162, 166
Ball employed by, 19-20
Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 63-64, 67-68
Triffin, Robert, 204
Trujillo, Rafael, 326, 327
Truman, Harry, 61, 108, 1 12, 123, 127,
183, 184, 360

Stevenson as Presidential candidate
and, 113-15, 116-18, 120, 126,
134

Stevenson’s disagreements with,

1 16-17, 1 19, 134

Truman Administration, disorder in,

1 19, 120, 129, 134
Truman Doctrine, 166, 180, 349
I shombe, Moise, 226-28, 229, 230-31,

232- 233-58- 322

Tufts, Robert, 142

Tuomioja, Sakari S., 349, 350, 356

Turkey:

Cyprus problem and, 337-59
U.S. relations with, 165, 289, 293,

295 - 305 - 6 . 3°7
Tuthill, John, 22 1
Twentieth Party Congress, 165
Tyler, William, 265, 268

Udall, Stewart, 308, 309
Ulysses (Joyce), 13, 14
Undistributed Profits Tax, 20
United Nations, 159, 166, 175-76, 177,
185, 224, 271, 381
Arab-Israeli conflict and, 438-40
Ball as ambassador to, 436-44
Charter of, 31, 232, 280
in Congo, 227-29, 230-31 , 232, 233,
234, 256-58, 322

Cuban Missile Crisis and, 290, 292,
294-96, 300, 301-2, 303, 307
Cyprus problem and, 338, 340-41,
342, 347 - 48 , 349, 350, 351,

355 .- 56 , 358

Security Council of, 176, 227, 232,
290, 294, 296, 338, 342, 344, 347,
348, 406, 438, 440-44
Vietnam War and, 406, 428

United Nations Trade and Develop-
ment Conference (UNCTAD)
(1964), 193-95, 350, 352
Uri, Pierre, 84
Utley, Clifton, 21

U-2 spy planes, 177, 287-88, 299, 305

Valery, Paul, 15, 491

Vance, Cyrus, 106, 173, 324, 329, 408,

409, 446, 458, 461-62
Vansittart, Lord, 1, 423, 493
Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 14
Vaughn, Jack Hood, 329, 330
Versailles Conference (1919), 31
Vientiane Agreements, 362
Vietnam, partition of, 364
Vietnam War, 19, 154, 167, 175, 179,

360-433

background to, 363-64

Ball’s memoranda on, 380-83, 388,

390-99, 406

bombing of North Vietnam in, 381,

389-9°. 392-93, 395- 4°5> 4°8,

410, 411, 412-13, 417, 420-21,
42 2, 446

bombing pauses in, 404-6, 409
corruption of Saigon government
and, 387-89

De Soto Patrols and, 323, 379-80
Diem regime and, 364, 365, 370, 37 1 ,

372- 74, 427

distortion of perceptions and, 153,

336, 424

domino theory and, 361, 364, 366,
385, 386-87

“giraffe question” and, 376-77, 422
Humphrey’s views of, 445-47
in Johnson Administration, 174, 319,

325, 330-3 *, 336, 359, 368, 374-

409, 410, 413, 414, 419, 422,

424-33

in Kennedy Administration, 364-74,

375, 383, 427

Kissinger apologia and, 416-17
Korean War compared to, 366, 381,
393’ 4°°

legacy of, 468-69, 472
loss of U.S. bargaining leverage in,
4 1 3 _1 5> 4 1 6— 1 7

mytbs to explain U.S. lailure in,

373- 74, 420

in Nixon Administration, 373, 392,

405, 409-21, 422, 425

North Vietnamese advantage in,
369-70,413-14
Operation Rolling Thunder in,
392 7 93 > 395

opposition to, 171, 1 74, 2 1 5, 233-34,
366, 377-80, 382-84, 391-94.

399-403. 407. 408-9. 4 1 1 . 412.

413, 428-29, 430

Senior Advisory Group meetings on,
407 - 9 ’ 4 i 9

start of U.S. involvement in, 364-65
Taylor- Rostow report and, 365-66,

367. 374. 395

Tonkin Gulf attacks in, 379-80
as unnecessary tragedy, 417-18,
421-23

U.S. image undermined by, 412-13
U.S. interests vs. Saigon’s interests in,
4 ‘ 5- 16

Vietnamization of, 408, 413
Vincent, John Carter, 107
Volta Dam, 185-87
Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet de, 1 1
volunteer army, Stevenson’s views on,
145, 146, 147-48

“Volunteers for Stevenson,” 123, 125,
126-27

Wallace, Henry, 107-9
Ward, Barbara, see Jackson, Barbara
Ward

War Department, U.S., 43-44
Warren, George F., 19
Watergate, 66-67, 373, 420, 433,
450-51, 468
Waugh, Evelyn, 227
Weasel snow machine, 26
Weber, Max, 73-74
Wedderburn, “Sandy,” 27-28
Weintal, Edward, 359
Weisl, Edwin, 437

Index 527

welfare legislation, in New Deal vs.
sixties, 18

Wessin y Wessin, Elias, 327, 328
Western European Union (WEU), 94
Westmoreland, William C., 392, 407
Wheeler, Earle G., 324, 399
Whipple, George, 9-10
White, Theodore, 160
Whiting, Allen, 406
Wildman, Edna, see Ball, Edna
Wildman

Wildman, John (grandfather), 7
Wilkins, Frazer, 344
Williams, G. Mennen, 185, 230
Williams, Marcia, 336
Wilson, Harold, 106, 336, 405
Wilson, Woodrow, 167, 375
Winds of Change (Macmillan), 267-68
Wirtz, Willard, 137, 142, 189, 193
Wolfe, Humbert, 494
Wolfe, Thomas, 69
Woodin, William, 19
Wordsworth, William, 17, 18
World War I, 6, 7-8, 14, 25, 31, 35, 70,
262

economic affairs after, 31, 35, 70, 75
Macmillan’s views of, 267-68
World War II, 6, 21-68, 76, 83, 155,
36°

Europe on eve of, 21-23
Monnet in, 71-72
U.S. entry into, 23-24, 30, 36, 165
Wyatt, Wilson, 123, 125, 126, 127, 130,
131, 142

Yarmolinsky, Adam, 107
Yergan, Max, 234

Zahedi, Ardeshir, 458, 461, 462
Zorin, Valerian, 302, 303
Zuckerman, Solly, Lord, 25, 45

I

The Past Has Another Pattern

Memoirs

GEORGE W. BALL

“To his other services George W. Ball has now added a very good
autobiography. He writes delightfully. His memory is capacious,
his range of interests vast, his affection for the unlikely detail a
frequent source of pleasure.” —The Economist

“George Ball’s memoirs are everything that most of the art is not.
While he does not neglect his achievement, he is candid on the
things that went wrong. His public life has provided him with a
very great deal of very great importance to tell. And much of his
story is amusing.” —John Kenneth Galbraith

“A first-rate memoir of American politics and foreign policy over

half a century. . . . literate, lively, and amusing.”

— Daniel Yergin, New York Times Book Review
“George Ball is that rarity — a distinguished public servant who
can write; and his memoir is not only indispensable for the histo-
rian but absorbing for the general reader. ”

— Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

In his long and multifaceted career as a diplomat, international
lawyer, and statesman, George W. Ball has been at the center of
many crises. His book is filled with candid portraits of major
figures on the world stage, as well as keen and controversial
insights into past and present international problems. Perhaps the
most dramatic chapters describe the lonely and protracted fight
waged by Mr. Ball, then undersecretary of state in the Johnson and
Kennedy administrations, against our Vietnam involvement. He
presents a spirited account of that struggle and reveals how Nixon
and Kissinger, through a fatal error in negotiating strategy, pro-
longed the war for four years.

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